visas and waiting and henna

By the time I noticed that everyone but me had a big purple dot stuck on their boarding passes, I was almost to the front of the line. So I handed mine to the gate attendant, already knowing this wasn't going to go well. But how-not-well I could not have guessed.

"Show me visa," she demanded.  I opened my passport to the page with my Ethiopian visa. "For Djibouti," she corrected.

"I don't need one, I can get it at the airport, I'm an American," I said, geturing at my passport, confused. Let it also be noted that I think this is the first time I have ever said to anyone while traveling, in a situation in which I was being questioned, "I'm an American" like it was an answer for something. And I would love for it to be the last.

"Do you have an ID?" she asked. This was a odd question, I thought, since I had handed her my passport already, which one could consider the mother of all IDs.

"This is my passport, so, what do you mean?" I asked her.

"Military ID," she said.

Military? What alternate universe had the stairs from the boarding area led me down into?

"Nooo," I replied, waiting, straining at the impulse to say something sarcastic.

"Wait," she instructed, pointing to her left, as she reached behind me for the next passenger's boarding pass.

"I don't understand, I don't need a visa, I talked to my friend there yesterday, and I can get a tourist visa on arrival," I said, tasting the irritation rising.

"No more, no more visa at airport, go upstairs and talk to supervisor," she said curtly.

I pushed my way back up against the line of passengers coming down to board the bus to the plane. Up at the gate, I found a dozen people crowded around the desk, voices loud and angry in at least three different languages. I waited. An older man waving a Belgian passport started talking to me through the gap of his four missing front teeth from both the top and bottom of his mouth. That, and the thickness of his French accent, made it a bit difficult to follow the particularities. But I did catch bits of "sheeet" and "fooocking" and other spit-punctuated niceties with which I wholeheartedly agreed.

When my turn finally arrived, I did the same visa-ID-invitationletter-thislooksreallybadforyou dance with the man behind the desk. Finally, I said, "I just want to go as a tourist for ten days. Ten. Days. And I have a return ticket," I stated plainly.

"Show me," he replied. I handed it over. He smiled and stuck a big fat purple circle on my boarding pass. Back down the stairs I went, wondering, what the hell was all that about?

It took all of 55 minutes to fly to Djibouti City. On arrival, we were herded into the terminal to wait. There was a line specifically for visitors with no visas, and it was significant. So much for the no-visa-at-the-airport issue. Once again I declined to shove my way to the front and waited. Eventually I handed my arrival form and passport to the man in the glass box and showed him my return ticket. He nodded, seeming to indicate no problem, and took my form and passport to the visa in a stack of others to the issuing office behind me.

I waited.

Standing outside the little office, I started chatting with a guy probably about ten years younger than me who said he was born in Djibouti but grew up in the UK. "I don't even like coming here, honestly, it is just such a mess," he said. I related my growing love of Botswana's relative ease of navigability compared to the last weeks in Ethiopia. We bonded. We waited. We kept advising the Yemeni guy standing nearby that he should really not try to bolt into the visa office every time the door opened but that he, too, should just. Wait.

Finally the three of us were admitted to the office, the last three remaining people from the flight. Apparently the Yemeni guy had been in China and this seemed to be some kind of issue. He was pretty jittery, that guy. And the official issuing the visas just could not figure out what to do about me.

"What are you doing in Djibouti?" he asked me when my turn finally arrived, his tone tilting towards accusatory but almost more puzzled than anything. I explained that I just wanted to visit, that I had a friend here and that I just wanted to be a tourist for ten days. He asked for the address where I would stay, which I had already written on the form in front of him. He asked me how I knew my friend. I said we had studied together in the US.  I showed him my return ticket. I showed him Ladan's email and contact information. I showed him her husband's contact information. He made a call. I sat. And waited.

Another officer came to the door of the small office. "Miss Rashelle Demoss?" he asked. I had a feeling.

"Yes," I said calmly. "Is Ladan looking for me outside?"

She was. In fact, they had started to turn out the lights in the airport and her concern led her to ask one of the officers outside to go and see if I was still in there. And there I was.

Remarkably, the officer returned momentarily with Ladan and her two daughters in tow. I could not believe that they had just let her in, but I am also familiar with her powers of persuasion. The girls were so excited to see me and so affectionate that they guy behind the desk asked if they were mine. Ilwaad, who is approaching four, hugged me repeatedly. Then she hugged the guy behind the desk. I grinned and kept quiet.

The conversations switched to Somali. It seemed that he then began asking Ladan everything that he had already asked me. More phone calls were made. More conversation ensued. And I waited.

Finally, at a moment that followed nothing in particular, I saw him insert a blank visa sticker into the printer, wait for it to slide out the top, and adhere my permission to my passport. They unlocked the doors to let us out after picking up my backpack, and away we went.

The afternoon was the perfect antidote to annoyance. We sank into the couches in Ladan's sitting room, sipping cool hibiscus flower juice and pulling the curtains over the sunny windows to help keep the air conditioning inside (it is a lot freaking hotter in Djibouti than it was in Ethiopia). The girls giggled and played. We talked. Sitting down to lunch, Mariam, who is seven, asked me, "If you are in our family, then why are you a different color than me?"

We had told the girls to call me Auntie, which while relatively normal with many of my friends' kids, is apparently not usual for them. So I tried to explain to Mariam about kinds of family, about how we all have the family into which we are born, the one that we are given. But sometimes when we are really lucky, when we live our lives we find other people who feel like our family to us, even if they were born far away and look completely different. This, I told her, is what it is like for me and your mom, so that is why you and your sister are like my family, too.

Her expression turned especially serious and thoughtful, but I don't think she quite understood. Later, though, when it was getting dark and Ilwaad turned to me and asked, "Can you stay here with us?" This made me think, I hope they learn what I meant by feeling.

In the afternoon, a woman named Yasmin was fetched to paint us all with henna in preparation for the Eid Moubarak celebrations coming up on Friday. First, she decorated my hands with scrolling curving vines and flowers, tipping the ends of my fingers with the thick chocolatey paste, squeezing delicate swirling lines onto my skin like a pastry chef icing the perfect cake. Then, I think Dekha gave up her turn so that I could also have my feet done to match, but I didn't know that at the time.

Dekha, a friend of Ladan's, sat with me on the floor as Yasmin traced graceful lines along the arches of my feet. I wished I had scrubbed off some of the dry skin and dirt they carried after a month of travel, but she did not seem to mind. Yasmin spoke softly to Dekha in Somali, and they began chatting. After a few minutes passed, Dekha turned to me to translate.

"She say you are a good person, she can see," Dekha told me. I think I actually blushed; I felt a quick flush of red creeping up my neck. After so many weeks of the never ending crassly sexual aggression of Ethiopian men, such a gentle and quiet compliment warmed and embarrassed me.

I looked at Yasmin, her orange scarf slipping away from her face, so focused on my feet, copying the spontaneous glistening design of my left onto my right. "Well, I'm not so sure about that," I said, "but thank you."

"You are open, she say, she can see this," Dekha continued. I looked at Yasmin and she glanced up at me, with the quick flash of a surreptitious smile. I smiled too. This space, full of women who were so warm and welcoming, felt like refuge afer the constant harassment of walking around in Ethiopia.

I sat on the floor with the girls long past when my hands and feet were dry enough to peel and wash the excess off, trying to help them both be patient and still long enough for their to dry properly, too. Then there was spicy chai, and after sunset, little red beans cooked with wheat kernels and drizzled with sesame oil.

Yasmin kept working well into the evening, as the neighbor and her kids came over to join in. Later, I rode along when Ladan drove her home; she slipped out of the car when we paused on the main road that was apparently close enough to where she lived back in the winding neighborhoods of small dirt paths and puddles. I waved, but she had already turned her head towards home.