Getting In (and Out) of the Central African Republic

About ten days ago I wrote a prematurely apologetic and dejected blog-post explaining why I couldn’t go to the Central African Republic.  At that time I had a flight to CAR in 24 hours, and Fed-Ex couldn’t return my passport and visa for 48 hours.  I urged them to move mountains to bring my passport back in time.  I was actually sitting in a travel agency with the offer to cancel my flights and get $100 back when I made one last call to Fed-Ex. They said--to my enormous surprise--that there was a possibility my passport would come in time.  I waited, not even knowing if the passport had a visa for CAR inside.  I had no way to contact the CAR embassy, since their contact numbers didn’t work and my own embassy didn’t even know how to reach them.

My passport arrived about 12 hours before my flight, visa included.  Initially ecstatic, I momentarily considered whether I should still go to CAR.  I had already made a few back-up plans, and in some ways they were more attractive prospects than going to CAR.  Ultimately, I decided to go to CAR because I earned my grant with a proposal that included the country, and I felt strongly that my research on development would be incomplete without Africa.  

The best thing about CAR was the family that hosted me, which my contact had arranged. 

Obviously, the living standards were different than what I am used to, with only cold water and intermittent electricity.  Concrete floors and a wall topped by broken glass shards for security.  But for their country this family had a beautiful home, and that’s truly how I remember it.  

The father was a pastor so the house doubled as a church.  

Most of the family only spoke French, but we communicated enough, and enjoying World Cup football thankfully doesn’t require much conversation.

Unfortunately, my research in CAR was doomed from the start by a catastrophe of miscommunication.  My first two contacts at the World Bank had said I was welcome to come.  They had referred me to someone at the country office to coordinate my research.  This person later wrote my invitation letter, in which she invited me to help her with own project.  

In my first and only day at the World Bank country office in Bangui, CAR a few things went wrong.  The person who wrote my invitation letter turned out to be a secretary, who obviously did not have the authority to invite people to do research at the country office.  I assume she was just trying to be helpful, or she was caught in a confusing bureaucracy, but at any rate my contact was the least important person there.  The most important person, the country office manager, had never heard I was coming and basically said I should leave.

I briefly looked for alternative places to research in Bangui, but this proved futile.  I could only use internet cafes where the bandwidth was too weak to open my email.  Clearly coordinating a whole new research plan with new contacts would be logistically impossible.  

I could have stayed the next twelve days in Bangui and waited until my scheduled flight to Tbilisi, Georgia on July 1.  Part of me really wanted to.  I could have explored the country, though that wasn’t too safe.  Certainly my host family was welcoming and kind.  In the end I decided the opportunity cost of staying put without a World Bank project to watch over was too high, and I needed to be spending this summer learning what was in my research proposal, which I didn’t think I could do in CAR.

I managed to fire off one email to my brother Justin.  I asked him to book me a plane ticket to Moldova (one of the Plan B’s).  I didn’t even have a chance to confirm with a friend in Moldova whether I could stay with her (I managed to call her from the Madrid airport hours before my arrival).  To confirm the flight with me, my brother had to make numerous international calls, which I could only receive by wading into a nearby field until I could find a network.  48 hours after arriving, I was on a flight out of Bangui.

It was an all-around demoralizing experience.  I don’t know why three people welcomed me without asking their boss, nor why a secretary thought she had the authority to officially invite me.  But neither of these would have been a problem if I had done my homework enough to make sure the people I was talking to were the right people to be talking to.  I was also so committed to going to Africa that I turned a blind eye to some of the warning signs that it wasn’t a suitable situation.  The consequence is that I wasted time and money, quite a bit of the latter.  

There are a few tinges of silver lining.  Although I had gotten myself in the wrong kind of situation, I knew how to get out of it.  I called my brother and I gave him a fairly clear assignment.  The narrow mandate and his own business skills brought a solution in a matter of a few stressful hours.  This has also made me more conscientious with my next research sites.  I’m taking greater care to vet my contacts in Georgia than I did for Macedonia, CAR, or Moldova.  

These silver linings were not enough to satisfy my dad, however, who delivered to me a nine-point list of “boo-boo’s” by which I had screwed up in CAR.  The spirit of his letter to me was correct: At 20 I have coasted through life and very rarely made mistakes--mistakes of an academic or professional nature at any rate.  20 year olds who haven’t seriously failed at something can develop a dangerous sense of invincibility, and perhaps that was my malady in CAR.

The greatest concern that I heard from my family, in particular my father, was that I was unsafe in Africa, but I don’t think I was.  The closest to danger I came in CAR was when I wasn’t looking where I was going and a car splashed red mud across my front.  But that sort of encapsulates a lot about what happened in CAR.  So now I’m trying to look where I’m going more carefully, and I still haven’t washed the mud from my shoes.