It's been a big, social week. I was planning a detailed entry about it, but today sort of blew everything else into irrelevance. So, a quick recap of the week until today:
On Monday night, we went out for sushi. Yeah, I don't know.
On Tuesday, a group of us went to Moyo, which is a famous restaurant in Johannesburg -- there are actually a number of them all around the country. We went to the one in Melrose Arch, which is a very fancy and wealthy shopping area of Johannesburg. Parking our junky car in the parking garage was sort of a riot... we keep seeing these really nice cars all over Johannesburg, and it felt a little bit like we had found their nest. I set the car alarm off as we were leaving the car, and everyone turned around and stared. I wanted to be like, "Look, if I were going to steal a car in here, it wouldn't be this one!" The food at Moyo was supremely average, which was disappointing. According to some of the people in our group who have been in Joburg for longer than Melissa, Sandeep and I, eating out in Johannesburg is often a disappointing experience. The restaurant itself was very cool though -- we had to go down two flights of stairs to get to our table, and there were giant boulders around, and the bottom floor was clearly trying to 'feel' like a Bedouin tent. We got our faces painted with Xhosa-style decorations, which was a little bit hokey but kind of cute, and it was a nice night -- food notwithstanding.
On Wednesday at lunch, we went over to our sister office on the other side of the building to meet the interns at our funding organization. My NGO is its own organization, but we're funded by the Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA) and considered part of that organization too, and they have their own fleet of interns. It felt silly not to meet them, especially since they're all young South Africans, and I'm always keen to meet young South Africans who are interested in social justice. I had set things in motion a few weeks ago, and after a few missteps, we finally managed to meet up. There were 5 of them, plus the 3 of us. We ordered food in from Nando's (yum), and it was a really fun hour. They all seem really lovely and nice, and I think we're going to try to get together again as a group.
So, that brings us to today. When I arrived in South Africa, I got a 90-day visitors' visa stamp in my passport. It's the default, it's free, and it requires no paperwork ahead of time. The last time I was here, it was really easy to do something called 'border-jumping' -- crossing an international border for a few days, and then coming back into South Africa to get another full 90 days. I was planning to do that, since I'm actually in South Africa for about 100 days. Apparently, though, South Africa has caught wise to border-jumping, and they no longer let you do it. So I'm in something of a bind: if you leave South Africa on an expired visa, they charge you a fine, and there might be problems if/when I come back again. So my housemate suggested that I go to the Office of Home Affairs and apply to extend my visitors' visa, which is apparently easy to do once, to get an additional 90 days. The only problem is that I cannot for the life of me figure out what I need to apply for the extension.
I decided to just brave it blind, and marched off to Home Affairs this morning. Yeah. When I get there, the first thing that happened was a guy tried to convince me it was okay to park on the street in a handicapped spot. I told him that no, I wasn't going to park there, and he tried to tell me that it only used to be for people who couldn't walk. Then asked me if I was going to Home Affairs and needed photos. It didn't occur to me until I had already opened m mouth to tell him 'no' that he meant passport photos (which I wasn't sure about), but too late. I asked him how to get into the designated parking area next to me, and he very obligingly gave me directions and sent me on my way. It's so weird -- the whole area was full of people who it felt like were setting me up for scams, but they also very helpfully handed me along to the next step of the process without asking me for money or anything when I said 'no thanks.'
Anyway, I parked and walked over to the Home Affairs building. It was a zoo. There were lines of people snaking out of the doors, and not one official employee in sight. I was the only white person around, and I sort of stood there looking lost for a minute. Another guy approached me and slyly pulled out passport photos and asked if I needed photos. I still didn't know if I did, so I told him that I needed to extend my visitors' visa and I didn't know. He told me that no, I don't need photos for that, and to stand in this line over here and wait for a ticket to get into the building. I was like -- oh, okay. I kind of wondered whether it was the right information, but there were three or four other guys just hanging around who confirmed the information, and they seemed to be experts (though definitely not government employees), so I just did as I was told. Again, it was a pleasant surprise: the guy trying to sell passport photos could easily have lied to me and said that yes, I need photos to extend my visa -- but he didn't. For all the terrible reputation South Africa has, South Africans are often such a revelation. I have never been in a situation here when I needed help or advice and couldn't get it with minimal effort on my part. (At least from non-government people.) Often all it takes is standing and looking like a deer in the headlights for a second or two, and before you know it, someone wants to help.
So I stood in line, and a grumpy guy eventually came and handed me a green ticket with a number on it. He screamed at the woman in front of me for being in the wrong line, so I was kind of terrified, but he was okay to me. She had a permit from 2010, and apparently the line I was in was only for people with permits or stamps from 2011 or 2012. How anyone could have known that, I have no idea. I then had to go and stand in another, different, longer line to actually enter the building. It moved pretty quickly though .We went through a metal detector, and then I had to stand in another line to get onto the elevator to get up to the 6th floor. At every opportunity, I told anyone I could that I didn't know if I had what I needed, and could anyone tell me whether I needed a photocopy of my passport or were there any forms, and everyone just kept shunting me forward, so I kept moving.
I got up to the 6th floor. There were information desks, and a door to the left that said "extend visitors' visas." Before I went through the door, I told the guy, "I don't know what I need to extend my visa." He just said to me, "Move inside." So I went inside and waited on a bench until I got called up to talk to someone, and I explained I had no idea what I needed, and he looked at me like I was nuts and told me to go back out to the information desks and ask. I'm positive that he could have just told me, but oh! The joys of third-world bureaucracy. That wasn't his job, you see. There's another desk for that.
So I went back out to the information desks, and I found a group of people sullenly waiting -- and no one behind the information desks giving any information. There was a government employee on the phone ordering pizza, though. Efficiency! I also saw signs saying things like, "We do not provide forms. Please Google the forms you need." Oh, excellent. Even better, they then announced that their system had gone offline, so could everyone please make themselves comfortable. About 10 minutes later, they said the system was still offline and they didn't know when or whether it would come back online. They didn't appear to be willing to speak to anyone while the system was offline. I had been gone from the office for 2 hours already at this point, so I just gave up and left.
So. I accomplished exactly nothing. An extremely typical and unsurprising trip to Home Affairs. I was naively optimistic that it would be easier than I had heard, but South Africa did not let me down. I don't know whether to go back on another day (I still don't know what I need), or pay someone to do it for me, or just leave the country and come back in and hope I can get an extra 7 days, which I've heard is possible and is kind of all I need. I'll have to strategize.
I got back to the office and very quickly distracted myself by finding the decision from 2006 of Jacob Zuma's rape trial. (Jacob Zuma is the President of South Africa). I'm a terribly productive intern.
Around 3:30pm, I started to get anxious about the Supreme Court's health care decision. So I logged on to a site that was live blogging the decision and followed it obsessively for the next hour and a half. All three of us (Melissa, Sandeep and I) were on the same site, and we all were completely shell-shocked when they announced that the individual mandate had been upheld as a tax. I was obviously incredibly relieved, but it was also a little bit hysterical. After all the hard work that the Democrats did to not call this a tax, which would have been so easy to defend and so easy to justify -- but politically untenable -- the only way the Supreme Court was willing, with a majority, to uphold it was as a tax. We all were just like, "Oh my God," and talking about how it was Roberts, not Kennedy, who saved it, and then Caroline had to shush us because Melody was on a conference call and couldn't hear the other people on the call.
At one point, about 10 minutes after the main decision was announced, the director of the NGO slipped out of her office and looked at us and asked, "Are you guys following the --?" and we all go, "YES," as we're hunched over our computer monitors, obsessively trying to follow and understand all the nuances of the decision before the opinion was released electronically.
Then there was, of course, CNN's "Dewey defeats Truman!" moment, where their staff clearly only read to "Supreme Court strikes down individual mandate on Commerce Clause grounds" and stopped reading, and posted the following stupendous blunder:
Wherein Tea Partiers rejoiced (assuming Tea Partiers read anything other than Fox News, whose staff was apparently so stunned it failed to update its headlines at all), and then were heartbroken when CNN was forced to correct itself a few minutes later because yes, in fact, Congress does have a Tax Power as well.
Anyway. Needless to say, we didn't do any work for the last hour of the day. We drove home on a giddy wave of victory, and now we're sitting in a coffee shop near our house that is warm and smells like incense and has rooibos chai tea and free wi-fi.
Despite my utter and complete failure at Home Affairs (which I will count as a cultural experience! I wanted to take pictures, but thought the government might be unhappy about that, so I didn't), I am going to count today as a success. And this week as a good week. Unless something catastrophic happens tomorrow. Knock wood!
On -- one other thing. A friend who I interned with when I was living in New York in 2009 is currently living in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, for 6 months as part of her MPH program. I have been trying to make it to Tanzania since 2007, but have failed so far. I decided that I was not going to fail again. It's expensive, but I bought a plane ticket to go up and see her the last weekend of July. Yay!
In closing, I can't help but share this:
On Monday night, we went out for sushi. Yeah, I don't know.
On Tuesday, a group of us went to Moyo, which is a famous restaurant in Johannesburg -- there are actually a number of them all around the country. We went to the one in Melrose Arch, which is a very fancy and wealthy shopping area of Johannesburg. Parking our junky car in the parking garage was sort of a riot... we keep seeing these really nice cars all over Johannesburg, and it felt a little bit like we had found their nest. I set the car alarm off as we were leaving the car, and everyone turned around and stared. I wanted to be like, "Look, if I were going to steal a car in here, it wouldn't be this one!" The food at Moyo was supremely average, which was disappointing. According to some of the people in our group who have been in Joburg for longer than Melissa, Sandeep and I, eating out in Johannesburg is often a disappointing experience. The restaurant itself was very cool though -- we had to go down two flights of stairs to get to our table, and there were giant boulders around, and the bottom floor was clearly trying to 'feel' like a Bedouin tent. We got our faces painted with Xhosa-style decorations, which was a little bit hokey but kind of cute, and it was a nice night -- food notwithstanding.
 |
| Being fierce with Jacob, my favorite of the Dukies. |
On Wednesday at lunch, we went over to our sister office on the other side of the building to meet the interns at our funding organization. My NGO is its own organization, but we're funded by the Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA) and considered part of that organization too, and they have their own fleet of interns. It felt silly not to meet them, especially since they're all young South Africans, and I'm always keen to meet young South Africans who are interested in social justice. I had set things in motion a few weeks ago, and after a few missteps, we finally managed to meet up. There were 5 of them, plus the 3 of us. We ordered food in from Nando's (yum), and it was a really fun hour. They all seem really lovely and nice, and I think we're going to try to get together again as a group.
So, that brings us to today. When I arrived in South Africa, I got a 90-day visitors' visa stamp in my passport. It's the default, it's free, and it requires no paperwork ahead of time. The last time I was here, it was really easy to do something called 'border-jumping' -- crossing an international border for a few days, and then coming back into South Africa to get another full 90 days. I was planning to do that, since I'm actually in South Africa for about 100 days. Apparently, though, South Africa has caught wise to border-jumping, and they no longer let you do it. So I'm in something of a bind: if you leave South Africa on an expired visa, they charge you a fine, and there might be problems if/when I come back again. So my housemate suggested that I go to the Office of Home Affairs and apply to extend my visitors' visa, which is apparently easy to do once, to get an additional 90 days. The only problem is that I cannot for the life of me figure out what I need to apply for the extension.
I decided to just brave it blind, and marched off to Home Affairs this morning. Yeah. When I get there, the first thing that happened was a guy tried to convince me it was okay to park on the street in a handicapped spot. I told him that no, I wasn't going to park there, and he tried to tell me that it only used to be for people who couldn't walk. Then asked me if I was going to Home Affairs and needed photos. It didn't occur to me until I had already opened m mouth to tell him 'no' that he meant passport photos (which I wasn't sure about), but too late. I asked him how to get into the designated parking area next to me, and he very obligingly gave me directions and sent me on my way. It's so weird -- the whole area was full of people who it felt like were setting me up for scams, but they also very helpfully handed me along to the next step of the process without asking me for money or anything when I said 'no thanks.'
Anyway, I parked and walked over to the Home Affairs building. It was a zoo. There were lines of people snaking out of the doors, and not one official employee in sight. I was the only white person around, and I sort of stood there looking lost for a minute. Another guy approached me and slyly pulled out passport photos and asked if I needed photos. I still didn't know if I did, so I told him that I needed to extend my visitors' visa and I didn't know. He told me that no, I don't need photos for that, and to stand in this line over here and wait for a ticket to get into the building. I was like -- oh, okay. I kind of wondered whether it was the right information, but there were three or four other guys just hanging around who confirmed the information, and they seemed to be experts (though definitely not government employees), so I just did as I was told. Again, it was a pleasant surprise: the guy trying to sell passport photos could easily have lied to me and said that yes, I need photos to extend my visa -- but he didn't. For all the terrible reputation South Africa has, South Africans are often such a revelation. I have never been in a situation here when I needed help or advice and couldn't get it with minimal effort on my part. (At least from non-government people.) Often all it takes is standing and looking like a deer in the headlights for a second or two, and before you know it, someone wants to help.
So I stood in line, and a grumpy guy eventually came and handed me a green ticket with a number on it. He screamed at the woman in front of me for being in the wrong line, so I was kind of terrified, but he was okay to me. She had a permit from 2010, and apparently the line I was in was only for people with permits or stamps from 2011 or 2012. How anyone could have known that, I have no idea. I then had to go and stand in another, different, longer line to actually enter the building. It moved pretty quickly though .We went through a metal detector, and then I had to stand in another line to get onto the elevator to get up to the 6th floor. At every opportunity, I told anyone I could that I didn't know if I had what I needed, and could anyone tell me whether I needed a photocopy of my passport or were there any forms, and everyone just kept shunting me forward, so I kept moving.
I got up to the 6th floor. There were information desks, and a door to the left that said "extend visitors' visas." Before I went through the door, I told the guy, "I don't know what I need to extend my visa." He just said to me, "Move inside." So I went inside and waited on a bench until I got called up to talk to someone, and I explained I had no idea what I needed, and he looked at me like I was nuts and told me to go back out to the information desks and ask. I'm positive that he could have just told me, but oh! The joys of third-world bureaucracy. That wasn't his job, you see. There's another desk for that.
So I went back out to the information desks, and I found a group of people sullenly waiting -- and no one behind the information desks giving any information. There was a government employee on the phone ordering pizza, though. Efficiency! I also saw signs saying things like, "We do not provide forms. Please Google the forms you need." Oh, excellent. Even better, they then announced that their system had gone offline, so could everyone please make themselves comfortable. About 10 minutes later, they said the system was still offline and they didn't know when or whether it would come back online. They didn't appear to be willing to speak to anyone while the system was offline. I had been gone from the office for 2 hours already at this point, so I just gave up and left.
So. I accomplished exactly nothing. An extremely typical and unsurprising trip to Home Affairs. I was naively optimistic that it would be easier than I had heard, but South Africa did not let me down. I don't know whether to go back on another day (I still don't know what I need), or pay someone to do it for me, or just leave the country and come back in and hope I can get an extra 7 days, which I've heard is possible and is kind of all I need. I'll have to strategize.
I got back to the office and very quickly distracted myself by finding the decision from 2006 of Jacob Zuma's rape trial. (Jacob Zuma is the President of South Africa). I'm a terribly productive intern.
Around 3:30pm, I started to get anxious about the Supreme Court's health care decision. So I logged on to a site that was live blogging the decision and followed it obsessively for the next hour and a half. All three of us (Melissa, Sandeep and I) were on the same site, and we all were completely shell-shocked when they announced that the individual mandate had been upheld as a tax. I was obviously incredibly relieved, but it was also a little bit hysterical. After all the hard work that the Democrats did to not call this a tax, which would have been so easy to defend and so easy to justify -- but politically untenable -- the only way the Supreme Court was willing, with a majority, to uphold it was as a tax. We all were just like, "Oh my God," and talking about how it was Roberts, not Kennedy, who saved it, and then Caroline had to shush us because Melody was on a conference call and couldn't hear the other people on the call.
At one point, about 10 minutes after the main decision was announced, the director of the NGO slipped out of her office and looked at us and asked, "Are you guys following the --?" and we all go, "YES," as we're hunched over our computer monitors, obsessively trying to follow and understand all the nuances of the decision before the opinion was released electronically.
Then there was, of course, CNN's "Dewey defeats Truman!" moment, where their staff clearly only read to "Supreme Court strikes down individual mandate on Commerce Clause grounds" and stopped reading, and posted the following stupendous blunder:
Wherein Tea Partiers rejoiced (assuming Tea Partiers read anything other than Fox News, whose staff was apparently so stunned it failed to update its headlines at all), and then were heartbroken when CNN was forced to correct itself a few minutes later because yes, in fact, Congress does have a Tax Power as well.
Anyway. Needless to say, we didn't do any work for the last hour of the day. We drove home on a giddy wave of victory, and now we're sitting in a coffee shop near our house that is warm and smells like incense and has rooibos chai tea and free wi-fi.
Despite my utter and complete failure at Home Affairs (which I will count as a cultural experience! I wanted to take pictures, but thought the government might be unhappy about that, so I didn't), I am going to count today as a success. And this week as a good week. Unless something catastrophic happens tomorrow. Knock wood!
On -- one other thing. A friend who I interned with when I was living in New York in 2009 is currently living in Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, for 6 months as part of her MPH program. I have been trying to make it to Tanzania since 2007, but have failed so far. I decided that I was not going to fail again. It's expensive, but I bought a plane ticket to go up and see her the last weekend of July. Yay!
In closing, I can't help but share this:
I love the face paint picture, almost as much as I enjoy the recap of your response to the health care decision. Shocked you didn't quote one of my wonderful gchats on the issue!
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