Passport Woes

There are five Americans who came to AU for the semester.  All five applied for temporary employment permits (TEP’s) early last fall.  Three of us got them, with expiration dates ranging February 18- March 18.  Mine expired March 17.  The other two who got them are a couple, and their applications and responses were in the same envelopes, but one expired Feb. 18 and one March 18. 
The other two people came in on tourist visas, having been told that AU would get their TEP’s once they got here.  So far, that hasn’t happened.  Those people have now each left the country twice in order to return with a new 30-day tourist visa.  One of them has been granted a 7-day extension this last time and is required to produce police reports from his home community in the US to verify that he’s an upstanding citizen.  (He’s a retired family physician, fortunately well known to some members of the police department that have nothing to do with him committing crimes.)  Immigration is requiring original documents, not faxes or scans.  It’s uncertain whether his letter will arrive on time.  When I exchanged express mail with AU last fall, it took 17 days for documents to get to me and 21 days for them to be returned.  In the meantime, he and his class are in limbo about whether he’ll be able to finish his course.

In the meantime, the university was unable to get TEP extensions for the other three of us.  I had no difficulty getting a tourist visa coming back from Botswana after my day trip to Chobe.  The other person went over the border to Mozambique, which is just a half –hour drive from Mutare.  There, he was required to stay out of the country for two nights, and then the immigration official gave him a 3-day visa and wrote in his passport that he was not to do any teaching on a tourist visa and was to pack and leave immediately.  AU intervened on his behalf and he is now allowed to stay until her TEP expires April 18, but with the stipulations that he is not to teach in the meantime, and that neither of them can get extensions beyond April 18.

This leaves me in a hard place.  No one has directly told me that I can’t teach while in the country on a tourist visa, but it’s clear that the government considers volunteer work forbidden.  I think it is unlikely that I could go to Mozambique and return with more than a 3-day pack-and-leave visa.  I’m not sure if I’d be successful if I went out to Zambia or Botswana, but I’m not willing to ride buses for 18-20 hours each way to find out.  The only alternative I see is to finish my courses and leave within the 30 days of my current tourist visa.  Fortunately, I’d always planned to end my courses a bit early, just because I understand that make-up scheduling and overcrowding at the library make the last two weeks of the semester difficult for students at AU, and I’d wanted to avoid that.  So I’ve scheduled two extra class periods for each of my Health Sciences classes over the next three weeks, and plan to complete them both by April 13. The primary instructor for the Humanities course in trauma will complete that course.   I’ll leave for the US on either the 14^th or the 15^th.   Papers for the trauma course will be emailed to me, and final exams for the Health Sciences courses will be express mailed for me to mark and email grades back to AU.

 I have really mixed feelings about leaving at this time.  I will have completed my courses, which was my primary goal in coming.  I’m just beginning to understand a bit about the culture, and won’t progress as far as I would wish with respect to that.  I also had planned to do more sightseeing at the end of this trip, when I wouldn’t have classes every day to tie me down.  I won’t get to do that.  Also, I feel the positive pull of home, family and friends.  This has been an awesome experience, and there have been many people I have missed while I’ve been here.  This way I’ll get to see everyone sooner, including that first grandson, who will probably still be born before I get home, but whom I’ll be able to see on Skype from Las Vegas.  The picture part of Skype is a luxury I seldom have here in Zimbabwe because the connections, both at the university and on my dongle, are too slow to support it.

 So I’ll see many of you sooner than we expected.  I’ll look forward to that!