Doing battle with the bureaucracy - Cairo 05.19.2008

I am SO thankful I waited until Tuesday to take care of the visa issues at the Mugamma. I had heard that things there can get pretty hairy, and also had read someplace that it closes at 2pm. So, it being 11:30 by the time I was done at Kalimat on Monday, and with my brain being more or less fried by the absurd heat, I decided to sit tight and tackle the issue of getting my visa extended first thing on Tuesday morning. All in all it only took three hours...but it was an adventure nonetheless.

The first thing that is problematic about the Mugamma is the fact that the interior of the building is laid out in an oval. This means that people tend to be VERY sloppy in giving directions, because no matter which way they point you, you'll *eventually* get there...at least in theory. What this means practically is that you spend a lot of time walking through hallways that all look pretty much identical, trying to decipher signs on doorways the whole way, and by the time you snap out of it you realize you're exactly where you started in the first place.

When you go up to the second floor, which is where all the visa stuff gets handled, you have two choices at the top of the stairs. Red pill, blue pill...just kidding. If you go left, the hallway is blank, there's an old wooden desk which may or may not have a dude sitting in it, and he may or may not look up or even notice when you pass. If you go right, there's a metal detector and an airport security-style scanner for bags. Now, remember - the building is laid out in a circle. So if you go left, you can very easily get anywhere that you could get by going right...so why would anyone go right?

I went left the first time, wandered around the building twice, and then went back downstairs to try to get some better information. Having struck out, I came back up the stairs and went to the right, since the place I was trying to reach was apparently slightly closer if I took this tack. Nobody was staffing either the metal detector or the scanner, and three or four men and I strolled through in quick succession.

I finally located someone who could help me, and when I told him I was looking for the visa section, he asked me why. The conversation went something like this:

Officer: "Why do you want to extend your visa?"
Tim: "I am a student, and I wanted to spend a little time studying Arabic."
O: "Do you have a letter of affiliation from your school?"
T, digging it out: "Yes, it's called the Kalimat langua-"
O: "That's a private school, isn't it?"
T: "Why, yes, but-"
O: "Then your letter is no good. Letters from private schools don't count."
[This was news to me, because the folks at Kalimat said that wielding this thing should allow me to float right on through any kind of opposition I might encounter, and reports from other web denizens suggest that letters from ANY academy are good.]
T, mouth agape: "Uh...well, what do I do now?"
O: "Show me your passport." [Glancing at it.] "What do you need an extension for? This visa is good for six months!"

In fact, I have no way of verifying whether this is the case. A little backstory:

There is no expiration date marked anywhere on the visa stamped in my passport, only my date of entry (May 6th). Further, there has already been confusion in this regard. When I checked the Egyptian Embassy website back in March before I flew out, the section on consular issues said that tourists got "3-month renewable tourist visas." Perfect!

But then when I got to RDU and tried to check in, the Delta lady told me that their system had listed Egypt as only offering 15-day, NON-renewable visas to tourists. Umm...what? I pointed out to the lady that this conflicted with the policy *I* had read, and she insisted that I was wrong. I suggested that perhaps the policy had been changed in the last six weeks, although I thought this unlikely...but when she probed further, she found that their system now seemed to say tourists could get 30-day visas, renewable only by leaving and re-entering the country. Hmm...not what I wanted to hear, but better than 15 days. She then claimed, however, that if I didn't have proof that my itinerary had me returning back within the 30-day window, I'd be denied a visa at the airport (where it is universally agreed-upon that you can purchase a visa for US$15)...so they had to change my flight itinerary to show me leaving on June 7th rather than on August 9th - and this would cost me a cool US$400. UGH. (Thankfully, it turned out that I'd only need to pay my change fee upon check-in on the way out of the country, so it wound up not being a problem - and now I can change it back to be the way it was.)

At any rate, when I actually touched down in Cairo, the guy who gave me the visa didn't even look at me, much less check my itinerary. He just desultorily chucked the visa at me after I'd counted out the dollars...so I guess all of that rigmarole was for nothing.

Okay, back to our fearless hero:

T, utterly confused: "Uh...well, what do I do now?"
O: "You need to go buy 11.10 L.E. of stamps at window 14, then come back and go to window 2."

Okay...I can do this. I set off in the direction he indicated, counting windows as I go. 10...11...12...13...15...16... *blink*

Wait a minute. Where's number 14?

I went back and looked again. Sure enough, to my left the numbers increased from 15. To my right, the numbers decreased from 13, all the way down to 0 and thence onto 85 or something. (Remember, the building is round on the inside.) Directly in front of me is...a stairwell. Empty. Hrmmm...

Well, I know I need stamps, so I just started wandering until I found someone who looked to be handing out stamps at windows 33-36. I bought them, and then returned to window 2 -- only to be told that I needed to go downstairs, get a passport photo taken, and make photocopies of my passport pages. I go downstairs and deal with both of those quickly -- possibly due to the stations' being staffed by young, as-yet-unembittered ladies. When I return and attempt to take a left at the top of the stairs, the guy at the aforementioned table gets agitated at my attempting to pass that way and angrily sends me back to go through the metal detector. This time, 15 minutes after I last passed through the doorway, both the metal detector AND the airport scanner-thing are being staffed, and these guys are SERIOUS. They go through my bag, ask me questions, etc. etc. - and all this time I'm thinking, "Where were you 15 mins. ago, and why am I so dangerous all of a sudden?"

Released by the security guys, I head over to window 2 and hand over my documents. The guy fills out the requisite spaces on my forms, noting everything in a massive logbook in front of him. (This seems as good a time as any to mention that the only computer I have seen anywhere in this massive building during the course of my perambulations is the one used by the young lady who took my passport photo and printed it off using a Kodak Easyshare cradle.) He says "Go to window 38." I keep standing their expectantly, waiting a) to be told what exactly I am supposed to DO at window 38, and b) to receive my passport back from him. I am absolutely PETRIFIED of leaving it here in their hands, and my fears are NOT assuaged when he takes these massive 14.5x8.5 sheets, stuffs them into my passport and, without looking, tosses the ensemble back over his shoulder in the general direction of a table. "Oh, crap," I think. "My passport is going to fall off those papers and I'll NEVER get it back."

Well, he's beginning to stare at me, and he's already repeated that window 38 is my next destination, so off I go. When I get there, a very surly woman awaits.

"What do you want?" she barks at me.
"I have no idea," I tell her. "The man at window 2 told me to come here."
"After TWO HOURS, not NOW!!" she practically screams.

Yikes. Okay then. I wander off in search of a place to sit and read, and spend the next two-odd hours alternately reading or catnapping my seat. When I wake back up for good at 11:15 am, the joint is PACKED. And, in true LDC fashion, there are no lines. It's just a matter of how much pushing, shoving, and cutting you can do without arousing the collective ire of your fellow favor-seekers and having them close ranks in front of you.

I head back to window 38, where a small gaggle of Chinese women, an Indian man, and a couple of tall Africans are crowding around one window. I manage to sidle up and sneak in front of all but the shortest Chinese woman, finding myself about three feet away from the window 38 woman. This provides me the perfect vantage point to watch her - literally, and without exaggeration - shuffle papers back and forth (without writing A THING in them) for nearly ten minutes. She had two piles in front of her, another two to her left, and some kind of accordion file to her right. She proceeded to pick up files, stare at them a bit, shift them to another pile, look at some other files, move one pile atop another, and then undo everything she had just done. It was absolutely mind-boggling to watch her do NOTHING, and so convincingly. From any position other than mine, it probably looked like she was hard at work.

The other thing I managed to observe during my ten minutes of waiting for the woman to actually *do* something was the Mugamma's proprietary filing system. As I mentioned before, everything that transpires there is recorded in logbooks - so you already know that loads of paperwork is floating around. What you may NOT have realized is that all this paper can't possibly fit into filing cabinets -- the combined weight of documents + metal storage would probably cause the entire edifice to sink through its foundation. Solution? Stack the papers loosely...by the windows...which are open.

Oh. Dear. God.

My passport, and all the paperwork related to extending my visa, is sitting in a stack of papers not six inches removed from a 2 story drop into the public square -- and I've already mentioned how windy Cairo can be. THIS is how the major government agency handles documents? My fear back at window 2 comes rushing back to me. Thankfully, at that point I was not aware that a major dust storm would come flying through town later that afternoon, with powerful gusts of wind whipping up clouds of debris and making it almost impossible to keep my eyes open for parts of my walk home. Had I known THAT, I might've been so discomfited by the location of my passport as to address the window 38 woman before she deigned to acknowledge me...and I can't see that as being a winning strategy.

As it was, she eventually grew tired of playing around with the papers, looked up and saw me frowning, and with a huff checked something off in my passport and handed it back to me.

Total time and money spent in the Mugamma? Only about 3 hours and 6 bucks, but it could easily have been much worse. Thankfully, except for window 38 lady, everyone was nice and tried to be helpful...but I can't help but wonder how much better it would all work if they canned two-thirds of the staff and just replaced them with computers. I don't know whether this is *actually* the reason for the Mugamma's bizarre system, but for a long time the Egyptian government maintained a policy whereby all college graduates were *guaranteed* a job in the civil service if they wanted it. Maybe all these thousands of employees are left over from the early days of this policy? I dunno...but that might explain why there are apparently so many people doing a job in the single most labor-intensive way possible, and some of those even see the need to 'pad' their day with the busywork of shuffling papers back and forth.

Alhamdulillah for a mercifully brief experience!