Madame, nous sommes un pais civilisé!

I don’t think I have ever crossed a border by land except in Europe where you barely have to show your passport – and I have certainly never done so by night when officially the border was already closed. The Rwandan side was not a problem; the country and its officials are very organised and follow procedure – so we filled in the departure card, handed it over to the person together with the passport and he stamped it and handed it back to us. Then this guy turns up and goes, ah, since we have to buses and a couple of cars from MONUC (the UN mission in Congo) that will cross shortly we are going to open the gates anyway – so there might be a possibility for you to cross into Congo by car tonight after all. Cool we thought – so we drove through to the Congolese side of the gate, where we had to stop the car to get all the paperwork done first.

I was dying for the toilet, so I asked the official if there was a bathroom I could use – he just went ‘mais bien sur, madame, on est quand même un pais civilisé!’ – well, the latrine was just as smelly as all the others I’ve been on – but at least there was one ;-))

So we went to the office where we were told to have a seat and wait; that the border was really closed and that they had to ring the official so and so to get permission to let us through. Also, we would have to leave our passports at the border control office until tomorrow because there was no way of issuing the visa at this time of night, seeing as they were officially closed; we had to come and pick them up the next morning. We didn’t exactly like the idea of leaving our passports there over night and got a bit edgy when were told that – but were assured that ‘il n’y a pas de problème!’ – we wanted to get into Goma and so agreed that we would come back in the morning. This was the point at which we were told that we were expected to make a contribution to the efforts that the border police had made to let us in out of hours; after all they had exhausted their credit on the phone and done us a big favour by ringing the chief (and pretending to be important, playing power games with us whilst never stopping to smile with this most cunning of expressions) – in blunt words – dosh please, or else you won’t be able to pass; they didn’t even try to pretend that this was not corruption. It was the first time that I have been asked to bribe someone and I really didn’t like it; but there was nothing we could do other than comply. The car, it turned out, would cost us the bribe to 5 more people – a nice little chain of command that all wanted to be paid off if we wanted to bring it in that night. We decided we couldn’t be bothered to do so and were told it was no problem; we could leave the car in the no-man’s land before the barrier that opens into Congo – however, we would have to pay the military guy who would be guarding it – my arse! We told the guy that we would pay tomorrow morning if the car was still there and whole – you don’t normally pay for a service before you haven’t received it!