Back in Phnom Penh

The Krasovec Grundmann clan is now back to being spread out all over the world again after having spent last week together in Abidjan for the marriage of our friends Anthony and Sidonie Tanoh. This holiday weekend (it never feels much like Independence Day outside of the States) finds Kathy in Bamenda, Cameroon doing some work for EGPAF and the Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Board; Nico slumming around Bangkok at the start of his 7 week S.E. Asian adventure with his friend Max; Stefan in Washington, D.C. starting work at FINCA (a micro-finance organization); and me sweating lightly under a fan here in PP.

I have mentioned before that Cambodia is quite hot, but that we've seemingly adapted to it faster than I would have expected. This was reinforced during out trip to Abidjan. I've been to Cote d'Ivoire a couple of dozen times and not once did I ever think that it was anything but hot. On this trip it seemed almost cool. Admittedly, it rained almost every day, but it does here in PP as well. Unless it was a freakishly cool period in Ivoirian climate history (which nobody alluded to) the only conclusion can be is that it is really, really hot in Cambodia...

Our trip to Cote d'Ivoire was also interesting for a completely different reason. For the whole time I worked in CI Americans did not need visas. So we assumed Americans still didn't need visas. Bad assumption. Kathy, Nico and I all arrived in Abidjan on the same flight and were met at the gate by a friend of Anthony's. As we approached Immigration we were joined by another friend of Anthony's, who turned out to be the head of the Airport Police Division. He asked for our passports to jump the lines waiting for their passports to be stamped (VIP service, in other words). He casually mentioned that we must have visas. After 3 minutes of discussion where we made clear that we did not have visas, he made a snap decision and walked us right by all of the immigration officials, waving them off and telling them that "we'd be back". Which, of course, was not true. So we ended up in CI for a week illegally without visas.

The problem was that Stefan was arriving 24 hours later and would face the same problem. So we called him and caught him in the Atlanta airport between the first and second of the 3 flights that he was taking to get to Abidjan. We told him that he would be met at the plane and whisked through immigration. Both the friend and the policeman said that they would meet Stefan the next night. But for some reason I had a bad feeling...

So, 30 hours later we were waiting for Stefan at the airport as the Air France flight came through immigration and customs. No Stefan. Then a policeman arrived and asked us what Stefan looked like, which didn't seem like a very good sign. Turns out that the Police Chief had taken ill, and that the friend had decided to watch the Cote d'Ivoire-Burkina Faso soccer game rather than go to the airport. Stefan had found himself at immigration without a visa, had turned to the closest policeman for help when the Immigration Officer started shouting at him in French, and soon found himself being marched over to the departure wing to be put right back on the Air France flight out of CI. He had the presence of mind to argue enough with the policemen that his parents were awaiting for him and they let him come out front to see us (otherwise he would have just been whisked around in back and we would never have known what was happening).

Anthony arrived on the run and, 3 hours and a whole bunch of phone calls later, we all left the airport together. The sick Police Chief had ordered him off of the plane (over the phone from his sick bed), but the police who had ordered him on the plane refused to officially reverse their decision, so we had to wait for a shift change before he got the paperwork that let him into the country. The irony was that in the end Stefan was the only one who got a visa, and Nico, Kathy and I had to be escorted back through departure Immigration by the police chief to get out of the country. So we went all week without visas, which was a little stressful because there is always a small risk of getting pulled over at a police stop.

In the end we got some stress and Stefan got a story for life.