The days in Ouaga were supposed to give us time to relax and reload, but things rarely happen as they’re supposed to, especially not here.
Elli had gotten sick in Gourcy, and when she didn’t get better, we went to a clinic a couple of blocks away to get tested for malaria. A couple of hours later, we got the results. Mine were negative, but Elli had a nice little number of blood cell eating parasites swimming around in her veins. No wonder, then, that she wasn’t feeling so well.
So for Elli, the stay in Ouaga meant feeling like shit, going through a long number of doctor’s appointments and tests, and trying to sleep the nausea away.
My mission during these days, except for doing the afterwork on my transect walks and resting, was to get a tourist visa to Ghana. My mom works in Liberia, and originally the plan was that I would go to Monrovia for Christmas. But then Ebola exploded, and after having spent most of the fall in Stockholm, the Swedish Embassy has opened again and now mom is working on a quite changeable two week Monrovia/two week Stockholm schedule. But, since Liberia still is in a pretty bad state and not really a country that you want to go on vacation to, me and mom had decided that we would celebrate Christmas in Ghana instead. But to do that, I needed the visa.
So I went to the embassy fully loaded with official papers of my offical status as a student and research collaborator in this country, as I had been told that I should. Officially, I shouldn’t be allowed to get a visa here, I should have to apply for it in Copenhagen, but since I wasn’t in Burkina for pleasure, I had been told that I should be able to get the visa anyway. I gave the visa application office man all my papers and he seemed happy with them, but then he started asking all these questions about what I was planning to do in Ghana, where I wanted to travel and why, and being interrogated like that made me really nervous. And then he rounded the whole interview up by flirting with me. I came out of the office, not knowing if it had gone well or just terribly, and when the embassy entrance guard also started flirting with me, my mouth just blurted out something and it wasn’t until I saw the guard’s sudden very serious face that I realized I had just told him a joke that basically insinuated I could be a terrorist. It was meant sarcastically, I said maybe I wouldn’t get a visa because of the color of my eyes, I do look quite suspicious after all, but the guard, oh, his face. I panicked and started explaining that it was a joke and that of course I wasn’t a terrorist and that of course there was no reason why the embassy shouldn’t grant me a touris visa and the guard nodded solemnly and then I left with a huge knot in my stomach.
For the two days it took for them to process my application, I sat on the porch at Chez Tess working, completely convinced that the guard would tell the visa people, and that they in turn would deny me the visa because of my suspicious behavior. I was angry at myself for getting nervous about being interviewed, and especially for being so catastrophycally bad at handling men flirting with me when I wasn’t expecting it.
But I got the visa. And both the application man and the guard flirted with me again. And I felt silly for having freaked out like that in the first place.
Except for those small outings, we didn’t get away from Chez Tess at all. I worked, Elli slept, we ordered food to the hotel and watched Community and Masters of Sex in the evenings. And then I left for Kaya.
Katja Malmborg 