"Do You Know the Visa Rules?"
Not a single time that I entered or left Tanzania through its main international airport in Dar es Salaam was I able to go through its lines and paperwork without at least facing some sort of obstacles from immigration officials. On the way out, it ranges anywhere from "where were you this whole time?" to "why were you here so long?" On the way in, its always some sort of hassling for payments. "Where is your visa?!" "Is it a multiple entry visa?!" "Oh you live in Iringa, where is your residence permit?!" "No, no, you don't get the permit in Iringa, you get it right here in Dar! Because where is Dar? Dar is in Tanzania!" A few attempts at negating the reasoning of the border officials quite become the author getting screamed at by the said officials, always proud, always self-confident, and always picking out some holes in the paperwork that leads to extra payments.
With situations like these, I am glad that I worked for a fairly reputable NGO. Mentioning that one works for the good of local farmers, however terse it might be given the tense circumstances, somehow manages to create some bureaucratic wiggle room. "Oh, you don't have 200 USD for the permit? Fine, you pay in Iringa." The hushed tone of the compromise and scrappy scribbling of notes "to pay at Iringa" at the back of the entry form, I felt, perhaps wrongly, would surely not be a luxury available to every foreigner stuck in the same dilemma.
Alas, even the most flexible immigration officers are not likely to openly oppose the implementation of set-in-stone visa policy, however. And that is exactly the reason I frequently flew to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, not for work, not for pleasure, but for the purpose of, for the lack of better words, bureaucracy-related exile. Tanzanian visa requirement required foreigners to leave the country after some period of in-country presence before returning to the country.
Yet it is not always the angry faces of the immigration officials that foreigners fear. Instead, the fear is that there is and will continue to be a local bureaucratic backlash against expatriates who fail to take local visa policies seriously. Despite all the unpleasant encounters with immigration officials, many foreigners may not take immigration rules as seriously as they should as much as Tanzanian authorities hope they do. Frequent experience with border officials only taught them that at the end of the day, wiggle room does exist and things can be sorted out with money.
For every visa change, the same attitude have applied. Upon hearing the news of a change, I asked locals about the policy change. They mention of local news outlets reporting the change, government announcement of the changes, and absolutely no shortage of social media content disseminating info, whether true or rumored, about the change. In contrast, expatriates have not paid attention to any of these. Only faced with vague "potential of arrest" was the news taken more seriously in the small community of foreigners in Iringa.
Of course, the isolationist tendency of the expatriate community does play a role in such news taken in too lightly and too late. When local news, of any sort, however important, is relegated to a secondary status far behind those of hometowns and countries thousands of miles away, important local changes are bound to noticed not so immediately. But still, the bigger issue is that, even when noticed, the important local changes are not considered so important, precisely because of the method by which they are enforced in real life.
Maybe the next time I return to Tanzania, I will decide to show a sense of respect that is more genuine than feigned. No longer will I see the immigration officers' arrogant attitudes as inflated attempts to show the real foreigner "who is the real boss around here," but see those attitudes as real attempts to improve border security of the nation by making sure all incoming foreigners are systematically and seriously adhering to the country's laws. If an active change of mentality can be the first step in handling nasty surprises in legal changes, so be it.
With situations like these, I am glad that I worked for a fairly reputable NGO. Mentioning that one works for the good of local farmers, however terse it might be given the tense circumstances, somehow manages to create some bureaucratic wiggle room. "Oh, you don't have 200 USD for the permit? Fine, you pay in Iringa." The hushed tone of the compromise and scrappy scribbling of notes "to pay at Iringa" at the back of the entry form, I felt, perhaps wrongly, would surely not be a luxury available to every foreigner stuck in the same dilemma.
Alas, even the most flexible immigration officers are not likely to openly oppose the implementation of set-in-stone visa policy, however. And that is exactly the reason I frequently flew to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, not for work, not for pleasure, but for the purpose of, for the lack of better words, bureaucracy-related exile. Tanzanian visa requirement required foreigners to leave the country after some period of in-country presence before returning to the country.
Yet it is not always the angry faces of the immigration officials that foreigners fear. Instead, the fear is that there is and will continue to be a local bureaucratic backlash against expatriates who fail to take local visa policies seriously. Despite all the unpleasant encounters with immigration officials, many foreigners may not take immigration rules as seriously as they should as much as Tanzanian authorities hope they do. Frequent experience with border officials only taught them that at the end of the day, wiggle room does exist and things can be sorted out with money.
For every visa change, the same attitude have applied. Upon hearing the news of a change, I asked locals about the policy change. They mention of local news outlets reporting the change, government announcement of the changes, and absolutely no shortage of social media content disseminating info, whether true or rumored, about the change. In contrast, expatriates have not paid attention to any of these. Only faced with vague "potential of arrest" was the news taken more seriously in the small community of foreigners in Iringa.
Of course, the isolationist tendency of the expatriate community does play a role in such news taken in too lightly and too late. When local news, of any sort, however important, is relegated to a secondary status far behind those of hometowns and countries thousands of miles away, important local changes are bound to noticed not so immediately. But still, the bigger issue is that, even when noticed, the important local changes are not considered so important, precisely because of the method by which they are enforced in real life.
Maybe the next time I return to Tanzania, I will decide to show a sense of respect that is more genuine than feigned. No longer will I see the immigration officers' arrogant attitudes as inflated attempts to show the real foreigner "who is the real boss around here," but see those attitudes as real attempts to improve border security of the nation by making sure all incoming foreigners are systematically and seriously adhering to the country's laws. If an active change of mentality can be the first step in handling nasty surprises in legal changes, so be it.
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