Day Trip to Kenya

(Written 1/6/11)

It's kindof hard to believe, but we are past the half way mark of our trip, and only have one more week in our third rotation at the hospital (each rotation is one month). While we were kindof planning on staying an extra month (aka 4 months total) the whole time, we made it official this week by taking a day trip to Kenya (which is just so crazy to say) in order to renew our visas. The Kenyan border is about 1.5 hrs from Kowak, so Fr. Jim drove us up. We weren't really sure how to go about it, if we actually had to leave Tanzania or if what we were doing was legal or not. We'd heard stories about having to bribe the gaurds in order to extend your stay- we didn't know what to expect. So on arrival at the gate, we decided to go for the straight forward approach and tell the Tanzanian customs workers what we were trying to do. They had no problems with us renewing our visas, but said that we did have to leave the country in order to do it, so we filled out the forms to cross the border, then walked to Kenya!

When we got to Kenya (about 15 seconds later), we went into their customs office, and decided to go with the same straight forward approach, as it had worked so well the first time. The customs workers we're really nice. We ended up being able to renew our Kenyan visas at the same time, which is great becasue we will be going to Kenya two more times before we leave. After filling out our arrival forms and completing our visa paperwork, we promptly handed the worker our exit form, telling him thanks you, now we're ready to go back to Tanzania (it had been about 15mins)! He looked a little confused, laughed a little and then said, "Oh, you're not supposed to do that, it's a capitol offense!" Oops, and we thought it was so obvious what we were doing! So we just smiled, acted confused (which we kindof were) and said, "pretend you never saw us!" then quickly left to go shopping in Kenya for a bit! We walked around and bought some rain boots for one of the guards for the church. The best part was we met a group of Americans who were traveling around the world volunteering in different countries, and had just arrived in Africa. They saw Steph's Ohio State shirt and threw out an "OH-IO," and crazily enough, 2 of them were from Northern VA (one had unfortunately gone to VTech)!!! After a little, we returned to the office. Good thing they liked us, because they went ahead and stamped our forms so that we were able to leave the counry with no problems! Back in TZ, we got our visas without any difficulty, so now we are legal in both countries 'til the end of our trip. While we're glad it all worked out so easily, we are a little sad we didn't have to bribe anyone...not that we'd have any idea how to go about it!