Never Get Stuck in a Border Town

I again had no problem at the Togo side of the border when I crossed in to Ghana but the Ghanaian immigration wouldn’t let me through. The problem was that I only had a single entry visa, but I had been told when I left Ghana to get into Togo that it would not be a problem to get back in on a transit visa (I was flying out in less than 48 hours), that I would just have to pay $20 USD to get back into Ghana. Immigration were far from helpful, they said I would have to go to the embassy in Togo to get the transit visa, and that I better hurry because it shuts in 15 minutes.

A well-hearing man grabs me and tells me he can get me to the embassy, I thought he was a taxi driver but it turned out that he was a hustler who loaded my bag and I into a cab. So now I had two people to pay – him and the driver. I decide to let him come for the ride anyway; if the embassy was closed I may need to use him to get me across the border.

I make it with only five minutes to spare and am told to sit and wait.  Finally the woman in charge comes out of her office and gives me the relevant forms. Luckily I have enough cash and some passport photos ready. She tells me that they are closed now and she doesn’t have time to look at the forms but will do it the next day. I plead with her to look at them now. She says it will cost me money… another bribe. I giver her what she asks for, she tells me to sit and wait again and walks over to sit at a table across the room and rests her head on the desk.

I don’t know what she is doing. She had just finished telling me that she was in a hurry to finish and there she was falling asleep on her desk while I had two guys sitting outside waiting for me, charging by the minute.

I could feel my blood beginning to boil.

I understand she was already staying back ten minutes, but that was what the bribe was for was it not? Surely she realises if she just stamps the bloody passport now she could go home.

I clear my throat and gently, trying not to explode with rage, ask her if she will be long.

With a great huff, she pushes her chair back making a loud scraping noise against the floor. Like a film in slow motion she rises and dawdles off to her office.

I pace the room anxiously staring at the clock. Every second she wastes is costing me money.

She finally remerges “pick it up tomorrow”.

“What? No! Tomorrow? No! I need to leave, I need to get back to Accra” I tell her. “I am not staying in Togo, I am just passing through trying to get back to Accra to catch my flight to South Africa”.

“Get a hotel, stay tonight, pick it up tomorrow” She tells me.

Exasperated I ask if there is any way she can do it now, wondering if she wanted even more money.

She actually yells at me “Usually it takes three days I already do you a favour!”

“How can a 48 hour visa take longer to process than the time I am allowed to stay?” I yell back. I couldn’t believe I paid this bitch a bribe!

All rational thinking shut down. I demanded my passport and my money back. I didn’t have a plan B but this woman had pissed me off.

She stormed into her office to get the passport and I tried to reason with my hot-headed self, telling myself it was just one night, to do as she said, get a hotel, and still I should make it back to Accra in time to get my flight. But my stubbornness was too conceited and when she handed my passport and money back I snatched it and slammed the door behind me.

Back outside I was surprised to see the two men and the taxi still waiting, I had honestly been thinking that they, and my bag, would have been long gone by now. I told them what had happened.

“This is what we do” The hustler said.

“We will take you to another border, at that border I know the guard, you pay him a little money and on the other side we put you in another taxi. That taxi will take you to the embassy in Accra, they will stamp your passport, no problem!”

“And how much will all this cost me?” I ask

“Little little” he says.

“I only have little little. What exactly is little little?”

He says it will be 30’000 for the driver, 10’000 for the border guard and for him ‘whatever my heart feels is right’.

“You are not doing it from your heart, you are doing it for money, how much do you want?” I demand to know.

20’000 he finally suggests.

I manage to bargain them down a small amount and for a moment of irrationality I get back in the car to make my great illegal escape across the border.

A million ‘what if’ scenarios race through my mind. What if his friend the guard is not on today? What if the embassy in Ghana is closed? What if the embassy in Ghana arrests me for entering illegally? What if I miss my flight and am stuck in West Africa?

I tell the driver to turn around. Take me back to the bitch at the embassy and I will grovel for forgiveness. I HATE caving in a fight, I HATE saying I was wrong and I HATE having to beg, but a small sensible part of my brain insisted I had to do it.

I had to beg security to let me back in the closed building and I had to beg the receptionist to get the bitch in charge back. She made me wait twenty minutes… twenty very expensive minutes (the two men and the taxi were once again waiting outside). If I were her I would have made me sweat it out even longer than that!

I swallowed my pride. A great big gulp of pride and manage to stammer an apology.

“I am sorry I was angry, I am sorry I was rude to you” I force myself to say. “I really need your help”. It hurt hearing myself say it.

She snatches my passport out of my hand and snatches the money too and slams the door on the way out.

Back at the taxi a long argument ensues about what I owe the men for their help. They tell me how long they had to wait and that for that they need lots of money. Oh! The irony! In this part of Africa most men seem to spend all day dozing under a tree and now I am meant to pay an arm and a leg for them doing it.

We finally settle on a price and it includes a ride to a cheap hotel. It needed to be close to the embassy and close to the border. But I had very little money left and when I said it had to be cheap I meant it.

They took me right to the edge of the border and knocked on the door of a construction site.  A man let us in and the hustler told him my situation. The man led me through the debris to a little room in the back. It had several mattresses on the floor which were dragged out – this was the room the workers had been using for their midday naps. But it was all I could afford so I said yes I would take it.

I went for a walk to the beach in an attempt to calm down. Border towns are notoriously filthy and dodgy, and this was no exception. The streets were crowded with hustlers, drug dealers, sex workers and people gambling on the streets, it reeked of urine and faeces. As I passed every head turned and stared. Men stopped me every few steps to try to chat me up or sell me something. I was still in a fowl mood so was quite good at brushing them off.

Walking across the sand I had to dodge several piles of burning rubbish and when I got to the shoreline that was meant to calm me I was horrified to see it lined with squatting bodies, I watched poo drop out of one man and roll into the sea. I turned to leave as a wave crashed around my ankles and splashed up the inside of my legs, I leapt in surprise but it was too late. I looked down to see that the water had managed to perfectly saturate only around my crotch and down the inside of my legs. For the second time on this trip it undoubtedly looked like I had peed myself.

Walking back to the hotel I kept my head down to avoid any judging looks. Then I thought ‘to hell with it! What do I care if people think I wet myself?’ So I stopped on the side of the street and bought a plate of rice and beans. The woman serving glanced at my wet pants. “The ocean” I say trying to defend myself.

 “Ahhhh! I thought you pissed yourself” she casually says without even the slightest hint of amusement, as though it would have been completely normal if I had.

I go back to the construction site and lay on my bed listening to my ipod. Eventually I fall asleep and at 7am the next morning I get a knock at my bedroom door.

“My name is Cybel, you met my sister” the man on the other side of the doorway tells me. “At the embassy… the big fat lady… she is my sister.”

I cant help but chuckle at his description of his sister.

“Wait! How did you find me? How did you know who I was and where I am staying?” I ask him trying to draw all the links?

He shrugs and continues.

“I spoke to my sister and she says she will give you your visa if you give her small small” he says rubbing his fingers together in the universal sign for money.

“She wants a bribe?” I try to confirm.

“No not a bribe, just some money” he says

“So a bribe” I repeat.

“You cannot say bribe. Bribe is not a good word” he says.

“But she wants money, illegally, to make her help me. This is a bribe”.

“No bribe. A thank you present” he insists.

“A thank you present before someone does something, when they tell you to give them a thank you present that is a bribe”.

He says this is how Africa works. I ask him if it drives him crazy – all the bribes, all the corruption. He doesn’t understand me, he just repeats that this is how it works.

“OK so I pay your sister a ‘thank you’ present… for a second time, then I have to pay you as well… I don’t have much money” I insist. I show him all the money I have left. He is disbelieving. I tell him the only bank I can use is bank Atlantique. He tells me there is none in this town.

“Then that is all I have”

We get on two bikes and head back to the embassy. While we wait for his sister to come out Cybel tells me a bit about his life. Ten years ago a man had paid him to drive from Togo to Burkina Faso. On the night he arrived soldiers broke into his hotel room and arrested him. He was kept in a cell and beaten repeatedly for a week. He was believed to be a part of a group conspiring to start a coup de tat. Whilst in this cell a guard told him that the only chance he had of coming out alive was with God’s help so he better start praying.

When he was released a few days later he was convinced it was the work of god and now he was Christian. He rambled on and on quoting meaningless passages from the bible. He told me Voodoo was wrong because the practitioners took the money given to them for themselves. I asked him what he thought the Christian church did with the money they collected.

He said to get what you want all you have to do is pray. He said he was praying to get a car so that he could be a driver and “be free”.

“How long have you been praying for the car?”

“Ten years”.

When his sister finally emerged with the passport I bitterly handed over the bribe – all the money I had left. I let Cybel give me his number ‘so that he can tell me more about God’ and made  my way back to the border.

Of course trying to leave Togo the immigration officer tells me I should not have spent a night there without a visa. I tell him the story, I beg him to let me cross, I tell him a hundred times I am sorry and I show him my flight ticket and how urgently I needed to get back to Accra. Eventually he lets me through and I nearly cheer when I step out of Togo and back into Ghana.