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What on earth?! (11)

A few years ago, I travelled to Zambia to backstop an emergency project that responded to one of the floods that hit part of that country. One of the consequences of this event was an expected increase in the prevalence of animal and plant diseases.

Evans Blue (EB) is one of the stains used to check the integrity of the cell membrane under the microscope. Normal cells keep the dye out, but it stains dead ones blue, indicating some pathology present and therefore a disease.

Fifty grammes of EB was about USD 250.00 (depending on the supplier). It is considered an expensive dye as blue is not an easy colour to find in nature.

So, when inspecting some of the purchases the project had done, I was rather surprised to find a bottle of 500g of the dye, produced in Zambia as, usually, EB is purchased from international chemical suppliers!

I believe that it was a rip-off from the local supplier that took advantage from the lack of knowledge of the client!

The rather large (and fake) Evans Blue bottle (left) and a true bottle on the right. The pen is for scale purposes.

Desperate ingenuity

Have you ever lived in a country with no embassy from your own? And if the whole continent has only three and the nearest is four thousand km away? Then, to ask you if you ever lost your passports in such a situation would probably be too much!

Well, this is what happened to us in Kenya so forgive me from what I needed to do to get out of that rather tight spot!

It was the end of 1983. My FAO fellowship was ending and we were getting ready to travel home to Uruguay -via Rome- after spending the last two years in Kenya as I have described in earlier posts.

We normally kept our passports at a safe place but we needed them to buy our tickets. It was during the second visit to collect our tickets that the worse thing that could have happened did happen: we lost them! It was only at that time that the location of the Uruguayan diplomatic representations became important to us! A couple of phone calls later (no internet then!) the news sunk in:

Johannesburg was the closest hope!

Luckily we had passport copies and our Uruguayan ID cards stored at home and we also had our Kenyan ID cards. While we could stay in Kenya (for a while at least), we could not do this indefinitely and absolutely not to travel on the 9 January 1984 as we had planned!

Although we immediately reported the loss to the Kenya Police, the passports had vanished and it looked like our journey had also gone down the drain as well! Before giving up hope completely, we decided to contact the Embassy of Uruguay in Johannesburg. We thought that in view of our “special” situation and the fact that we still have our original ID documents, a solution could be found.

After a frustrating phone call where I was repeatedly told that they would have had no problem issuing new passports but that we were required to be present in person in the embassy I gave up as they could or would not wish to understand that we were not able to travel from Kenya to South Africa without our passports!

My second hope -FAO- did not last long either as the Representative in Kenya -although very accommodating- could not help either. However, a couple of days later he told me that he could get FAO in Rome to arrange for our “special” entry to Italy [1]. That was some good news, albeit small.

Now we “only” needed to leave Kenya!

I can assure you that desperate situations enhances your imagination to find a solution. No, we did not walk at night all the way to Johannesburg to get our passports. Instead we decided that the most practical option was to tackle the Kenya Immigration authorities for a way out.

I booked an appointment and, not to go empty-handed, I decided to “prepare” a letter from the Uruguay Consulate in Rome as supporting documentation. I hoped that it would be not only a useful -and hopefully convincing- document but also a paper where stamps could be placed!

So, armed with our passports’ copies, Kenya IDs and the fake letter we ventured in the unknown recesses of the Kenya Immigration Department…

After going through a few offices as can be seen in the picture below, somehow we managed to get the needed clearance to leave the country! Very happy with the achievement but trying to be 100% safe, we found out the name of the officer that was to be at the airport at the time of our departure and we went to the airport to meet him and explain our predicament in person.

Clearly, the fact that we had the authorizations on the letter and also that we were leaving the country helped a lot and he kindly reassured us of our certain departure during his shift.

Kenya passport copy

The original authorization on top (19/12/83) by the boss of the office that instructs his junior to endorse the English translation instructing the responsible for shift 1/C to allow us to leave. We then went to meet the latter on 29/12/83 to get his agreement in person and finally departed on 9/1/84.

Luckily on the departure date Kenya Airways was on time and we managed to depart. The rest is history as we entered Italy, renewed our passports and continued our journey home to Uruguay, returning to Kenya a while later, now as a scientist with the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology.

 

[1] I never found out the conditions of our entry but we were probably refugees!!!