at the airport

Juba airport is the most strange place.  Surrounded by portakabins, which are the offices of all the airlines.  The places where you have to go to turn an e-ticket into a boarding pass and to check in your luggage.  More portakabins for some of the officials' offices, and then the departure area consists of tent roofs held up on top of scaffolding poles, strips of rotted hardboard perched on cement blocks on the ground over the bare earth below ... no photographs allowed of course, but it's always possible to take one at a strange angle with your camera hidden in your bag ...

But I jump ahead of myself.

My airport journey started in the Bannastars portakabin (between the Kush Air and the Dream Air portakabins) where I checked in for my flight.  I showed my ticket, I showed my passport - the visa, plus the Registration Stamp on the back page - and I showed my government Travel Authorisation allowing me to go to Yei, and I collected my boarding pass.  My suitcase was weighed and tagged on a portable weighing machine outside.  Then I waited.  & waited some more, standing around trying to catch shade from the already hot sun (at 8am) near the suitcases.

Finally they tell us to go and check in at the departure gate (the tented area above).  But on the way there, foreigners are pulled aside and told to go to another portakabin for another check of our documents.  My turn comes and the man tells me "you need a stamp".  "Where do I get that?"  He motions to his left (where there is a wall) and tells me I get it from the man in the office.  So I leave his 'office' and wander about looking for a different man in a different office .. somehow find him and he eventually gets off the phone then checks my documents.  Obviously satisfied, he affixes a post-it to my passport, writing on it, "To Yei: Approved" and he signs it.  I go back to the first man in an office who stamps the post-it.

Now to the tented check-in area.  People are checking in for a multitude of flights, all on the small airlines that are making money out of the South Sudan tragedy - going to Yei, to Nimule, to Torit, to Pibor - and one international flight to Nairobi.  I stay as close as is decent to the man in front, to prevent anyone from queue-jumping.

But then the man who gave me my boarding pass in the Bannastars office pulls six of us (all foreigners) aside and says we have to go to CID.  We follow him out of the departures area and around the car park and into another set of portakabins.  In an office there I am asked for my travel authorisation, which I produce.  The guy who took us there gets a ticking off - "They have their documents!  Why did you bring them here?"

Now back to the original office where the whole morning started.  We wait.  The departure time of my flight comes and goes.  There is no information, but I realise there is no power in the office, as the fan sits motionless and the sweat drips down all our faces.

Eventually we are called outside to watch the loading of our luggage into the back of a van, and then we walk back to departures.  At one stage a man inspects my passport and takes the post-it note.  I ask if I can't keep it as a souvenir but am told they need to file it with their records.  I cannot imagine the filing system for post-its ... already mine was curling at the edges in the heat.

Through the departures area and we got on a bus, and then finally onto the plane.  I reflect again on what an amazing life I have (and how lucky that none of the people who checked it spotted that the registration stamp in my passport by the Directorate of Nationality, Passports & Immigration describes me as being of US nationality).  Finally, here's a sneaky photo I took (camera inside my bag which was on the ground) of the Ethiopian Airlines check-in desk at the international departures area...