Imilender's tour in Sub-saharan africa

Looking at Kinshasa gives one an odd feeling. All the construction and buildings date back to 50ties and 60ties, to the date when the Belgium was still colonizing the country. After that very little has been done in the country. The buildings are decaying and the potholes in the roads have not been repaired. One gets a feeling that the colonialists have left monuments of the past that the people have not been able to maintain. The entire economy has just collapsed due to political instability. There has not been tax collectors collecting money in order to pay for the maintenance of the public roads etc. Just seeing how far the economy has collapsed makes one think. Could this also happen in Europe if we ended up in another war?

Anywhere you look in Kinshasa just strengthens this feeling. The buildings still give away the old purpose of them, but they have been taken into new usage. For example the office of one of the local operators is clearly in one old department store. One can see this from the large windows at the street level and especially from the escalators that are the only stairs to enter the upper floors. It is just ridicolous, as the escalators have clearly not been working for years, but people are still climing up from one side and going down from another. There is unfinished buildings that have been taken into use as apartments for people, retail outlets or even as goverment offices. People have just found a way to use in a way that makes sense, but still a lot of the existing infrastructure is totally left unused. There is a railroad that has certainly not seen a train passing for last 20 years, there is some grand monument that is just growing weeds.

For a white man, getting around in Kinshasa is difficult. There is no official taxis that one could use. And it is highly not recomended to take any of the unofficial transportation. Because of that, our company uses a security company to pick us up from the airport. However once you're in the city you're on your own.

Basically there are only three options to get around in Kinshasa.

1. Get a ride from your collegue. This is the easiest and simpliest method.

2. Walk. amazingly it is quite save to walk here. All you have to endure anyhow is all the tons of people selling you anything from ice (that they hold on their head!) to maps of DRC. The biggest problem in walking is that it is very hot here, so you will be drenched in sweat after couple of meters.

3. Rent a car. There are couple of global car rental companies operating in Kinshasa like Hertz. Renting a car costs a fortune in Kinshasa. The nice thing in renting a car is that you get a driver with the car. So in practise you do not need to worry about the traffic or scratching the car. You don't even need to worry about not knowing the ever changing streets and roads as the driver is a local and can get you there. Even though you have a driver, you do need to ask him to drive to petrol station to fill the car up just before returning the car.

Arriving to Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo) is an experience in itself. It starts with landing on to the only almost even 3 kilometer bit of "road" in Kinshasa. The strip is so bumby that I wonder how the planes tires can handle it. When I get out of the 30 year old 737 a hot moist air greets me. Looking at the planes around on the runway, I realise that the 737 is propably the newest plane in this airport. Rest of the planes are like from a museum of flight.

Driving from the airport to our office is also quite an experience. There is certainly not 3 kilometers of even road. Everywhere there are potholes and bumbs. It also seems that in here they use the cars to the very last mile on them. All cars around are battered and several wobble in various ways towards their destination. However everywhere there are people and cars.

The hotel booked to us advertises itself as a five star hotel. However I'm not sure on what classification. In Europe this hotel would probably get 3 stars at the maximum. The hotel appears to be from 70ies after which very little work has been put into the hotel. what is amazing is that this hotel charges even at our corporate rate an amazing 155 USD / night. And this doesn't even include breakfast. That amount of cash would make any local man jump do anything I'd ask for a month.

In the evening one of my local collegues takes me and another finnish out to a local restaurant. The place is called Bangal. What it is in practise is blocks of 1 and 2 storey concrete buildings dating from the 70ties. The buildings are worn down and look very old. The fronts of the buildings have seats and tables and small stalls grilling and selling food. We sit down into one of the tables and immediately people start bringing their merchandise to us. One is selling napkins, another peanuts, third cigarets etc. My collegues buys us some nappkins, leaving me wondering for the reason. Then he takes us to one of the stalls to choose what we want to eat. We order some grilled fish, meat "kebab" and grilled banana. In addition to that he orders us some local potato type vegetable what they call some type of bread.

After a while the food is served to our table. At this point I realise what the nappkins are for. There is now cuttlery. The food is very good and tasty. The fish is one of the best tasting fish I have ever eaten. However I must say that I do not want anybody telling me how the fish got to that grill. I doubt that it has been stored in ice throughout its journey. All the time the place is full of local people dancing and eating. The place is very dark as there is no street lights and the stalls have just limited lamps.

All though I believe it is quite safe to sit down here, it is still quite intimidating as we are the only two white people in the whole area. I feel , or at least believe that there are a lot of people staring at us and wondering what we are doing in this area. I believe or want to believe that they are just curious.

Trip here still continues, but I have to say that the first day have been very overwhelming and eye opening. This place definitely works very differently to europe.

One of the first things to do when getting here was to setup bank account. I have to say I was surprised to realize how challenging a task that was. I needed a lot of paper work, i.e. my lease agreement, my work contract, my passport with residence permit, a document from my employer stating that I'm a foreign citizen and I might have such funds available that no local South African can have and similar statement from myself.

Once I had all the required paperwork in place I went to the bank. However they could not open me a current or cheque account as I have no banking history from this country. All they could open is a savings account. Fortunately you can get a debit card into a savings account. Next challenge is that I'd need a credit card and financing for our second car. However for both you again need local banking history. For that I need to see if I can find a way to work around that, as we need to car immediately, not after 3-6 months of moving in.

Second fun part is that in local banks the clerks are highly specialized. That meant that I had to discuss with 4 different persons in order to setup everything from savings account to international transfers. In the end that took some 3 hours to do.

Now that I have an account setup, I just hope I can get my first salary payments as soon as possible. the annoying situation at the moment is that as I have no money on my local account I need to pay everything with my foreign credit cards. The problem in that is that then all the bills have to be paid in my home country where as the money is earned here and I get the compensation for the costs here.

Dubai is a weird place. This must be some kind of a bubble, I just wonder when it will burst. There is more construction here than in many contries in total. Anyway you look you see building being build, roads being laid and island and penisulas being constructed. For every 1 building that is finished there is at least 10 unfinished buildings. How can one place grow so fast?

What I think makes it even more amazing is that there is really no sensible reason why anyone would want to live here. The climate is terrible, even now when it is winter it is too hot and moist to be confortably outside, and most of the year it is hotter than now. There is nothing to see, expect latest architechture in terms of scyscrapers and the whole area is just one large construction site with bits and pieces of greenery in between.

Another amazing thing is the prices. For the most known mens clothing brands (like Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger) you end up paying pretty much the same as in any other place as well as all the stuff women would buy. But then there is a huge array of a bit less known brands that sell really good quality but seem to have an constant 75% discount. I ended up buying really good quality shirts or jeans costing some 20 euros piece. It's amazing that at Guy Laroche my end final price was 565 UAD but in includes discounts of 1695 UAD!

As a final comment. My luggage finally arrived! Only 2 days late. It is weird how important it is to get few pieces of clothing back.

I guess we all know the murpy's law, which according to wikipedia is "If there's more than one possible outcome of a job or task, and one of those outcomes will result in disaster or an undesirable consequence, then somebody will do it that way." Well I think yesterday truly qualified well on the scale of Murpy's law.

I had two tasks for yesterday: Open up a bank account and fly to Dubai. Well both went somewhat badly.

I started with the bank account. According to my collegues instructions I went to the Fourways mall to open the bank account. I went to the first bank I saw and queued to open an account. After about 15 minutes I got to the counter, and after displaying all the papers I had (i.e. my passport with work permit, my employment contract and my lease agreement), I was told by the clerk that I also need a document from Nokia stating that I'm a foreigner working for them. Don't know why, as I would think that is printed on the employment contract. well after a little bit of searching I found a second bank which was happy to open the account... However that took over 1 hour to open at which point I was already late for my pickup to the airport. So I had to rush out of the bank, and therefore got only limited documentation from the bank. i.e. I'm not really sure if I should yet trust that everything is in order.

I still managed to get to the airport some hours and 45 minutes before the flight to Dubai. However for some nice reason Emirates thinks that they can board a Boeing 777 through 4 economy class check ins. That plane fits something like 400 passangers so if it takes ~1 minute / passenger, than totals to almost 2 hours to check in all the passengers. This is pretty much right, as I had to wait for one and a half hour to board. The package handling systems were totally overloaded as they tried to process the passengers as soon as possible. I was told to leave my luggage next to the counter, which I did not agree to do, and fortunately the conveyor belt just started to move allowing me to place my luggage on the conveyor. What amazed me was that this flight was a code share flight with South African, and at the same time as Emirates was struckling to process those 400 passengers through 4 counters, there was some 20 south african airlines counters totally empty. But for some reason they could not process you to the plane.

Well suprisingly the plane left some 1 hour late. Nicely the seat I had in the plane was next to this old man who must have been a chain smoker as he smelled like an ashtray. He was also flying for the first time, so he was all the time asking me how to use the onboard entertainment system etc.

To Dubai we landed only some 30 minutes late off the schedule. The airport passport control was totally packed and it took another hour and half to get through passport control, which is very nice at 1 am. And guess what! Once I got to the luggage conveyor my luggage was not there. And they still haven't located it after one full day of searching. I guess it must be on its way to Timbuktu or something. Emirates service included giving me a shaving kit (after I asked for it) and the paper printout stating that I had notified them of the lost luggage. All they promise me is 50 USD / day for the first three days to purchase the missing goods. After that we have to wait for 1 month after which I will have to claim for the missing items and fight with them on the compensation. This is very lovely as that suitcase was all I had packed for me for the next 4 weeks. So at the moment all I have is my laptop & the clothes I wear.

The hotel pickup was not there at the airport, and the reason was found out once I got to the hotel. Our assistant had booked the hotel from 17th but the hotel thought it was from 19th. fortunately they did have some free rooms, so I managed to get to bed around 3.30 am.

So next in the line is to do some shopping in the Emirates mall.

First day is almost behind now. Unfortunately didn't get that much sleep on the plane as the toilet which was just next to me, was broken and it kept sucking all the time (instead of just when being flushed). That was anoyingly noicyt. After that I got a good wake up, as our pilot seemed to prefer hard landings. Fortunately he still managed to keep the plain on the runway.

So right after getting out of the airport, I headed into office... Maybe I should have tried to book into the hotel and get my room... After wearing same clothes for 36 hours one starts to feel quite uncomfortable. In the office I met a lot of new friendly faces and learned about our local setup. It is amazing, in here we are handling 20+ countries with the same resources we would have in Europe for a small country.

First challenge is, that I'd need to setup a bank account and get some local credit cards. As without one, I cannot get my salary paid, and therefore I'll have to use my finnish credit cards. Then of course all the payments have to be paid in Finland, when anyhow my travel expenses etc. will be refunded here in South Africa. I will try to get that sorted out tomorrow, however my collegues are not promising me an easy ride. They have been warning that it might even take several weeks to open up a bank account.

So tomorrow's task is to try to find a bank and setup the account before heading for the airport to fly to Dubai. Why can't they just pay the salary in cash?

Well, the day to depart is here. I'm now at Helsinki-Vantaa airport waiting for my flight... My moods are pretty mixed, on the other hand I'm excited to go and learn new things, however it is hard to leave my family behind for over three weeks. I will miss my wife and my daughter greatly. It's a shame that we couldn't get the house leased from day one, and therefore we could not all go from day one.

I anyhow hope that this will be good in the end. I hope I can manage to setup all the practicalities during my initial stay. And also I will be traveling quite a bit in the first three weeks, so I would have had to leave my family alone in new country. That would have been terrible as well.

I'll try to use the flight to write down a list of things I need to get done. It will include at least, opening bank accounts and credit cards, getting insurance for us and our belongings, setting up paper work for our removals, buying a bed and linens, agreeing on practicalities with our landlord etc... There will be a lot to do. I hope I can manage to do it all.

I hope South Africa will turn to be at least as good as I expect.

Well I did get the visa application into the embassy couple of weeks ago. Now I'm just waiting to see if they'll grant me one. It is amazing how much paper work you really need to get a work permit they wanted documents like a proof from a doctor that: "I'm not mentally disordered or physically defective in any way". I'm really astonished that any doctor is willing to sign such a paper. How can you quarentee that an individual is not physically defective in any way?

The next amazing thing is that there doesn't seem to be any formal list of requirements that would quarentee a work permit. When I called the embassy yesterday and asked if everything was in the order, I got an reply that the ambassador still wants to take a look at my job agreement before making the final decision. If he is willing I should get the permit on friday... if not then I guess I don't get one. The nice thing is that my new boss wants me to fly to SA already on thursday there after. So in 3 working days I then need to resign here, return my car (and pick up the second tires into it), arrange the removal etc. It would be nice to have some clarity earlier, or then I'd just need to be more trusting. But just for some reason I'm never certain until I have it in black ink.