Getting our Tajik visas

“I want to go to Tajikistan” says K as we wait in the small, stuffy, crowded room at the airport in Dushanbe with the rest of the foreigners anxiously, but patiently waiting to get their visas – permission to enter the country.  I can feel the tension in the air as I speak to Virginia, a lady from Palau in the Pacific Islands who is working in Darfur, Sudan and has come to Tajikistan to visit a friend.  She tells me the story of when she was here 2 months ago and waited for almost 5 hours to get her visa…she said she learned her lesson the hard way and decided to stay seated and quiet until her name was called by the visa officer at the other end of the hall.  “I’ve learned that the more I talk, the more questions they ask and the longer it takes to get a visa” she tells me.  I’m so intrigued by my conversation with Virginia that I have forgotten that K is with me until the room goes completely dark and I begin to look for him only to find him near the light switch – that HE has turned off.  “Don’t turn off the lights, we might not get our visa” I whisper to him as a woman from Ontario and a man from London look on and nod in agreement while chuckling to themselves.  Getting the visas is my husband, M’s, territory since this is his country – he’s been told to fill in another application form for each one of us and then come back.  There’s a photocopy machine near the visa officer but M has not been given permission to use it.  So he fills in 3 forms double sided as I try to keep K busy with various toys and food in his backpack while Virginia continues to talk to me about the media’s exaggeration of the situation in Darfur.  After what seems like hours, M gets to the front of the line and I am excited of the prospect of getting our visas and finally getting our bags and seeing our family.  But no, there’s a glitch, or so I think.  The visa officer asks for a copy of our return ticket and directs M to the photocopy machine.  A few minutes later, Virginia gets her visa and comes to tell me that it looked like our visas were being put in our passports.  I don’t hold my breath because I know that anything can happen.  “I need to pee” screams K who is standing a few feet away from me.  I take him to the washroom and he immediately scrunches up his nose and in English says, “ewww, it’s so smelly in here, I won’t touch anything” and as the cleaning lady nearby looks on, I’m glad that he didn’t say this in Russian.  Once done, we head back to the visa room and wait with my new found friends who are sharing a common experience of frustration.  One by one, their names get called and they return with smiling faces and good wishes to the rest of us who haven’t been honoured with the Tajik visa.  Finally, I see M coming down the hall towards me with a smile and I know all is well and we can go to the next line with another form to show our passports with our newly stamped visas in them. 

K is now distracted by the cleaning lady who is mopping the floor behind us and I am looking ahead to see if I can locate our luggage, all wrapped with a rainbow coloured tag for easy spotting.  It’s pretty easy to find our bags since we’re the last people in the line and all the others have claimed their bags, gone through the security scanner and met their employers, family and friends in the pre-dawn morning. After scrutinizing each of our passports and looking at our faces with a half smile, the customs officer lets us through and I begin to collect our suitcases as M goes to get some trolleys.  K is doing his part and has now spotted his Thomas the Tank Engine suitcase and grabs it from the luggage claim area and adds it to our pile.  I’m impressed that all our suitcases, 8 in total, arrived in relatively pretty good shape given the distance and the connections – Vancouver to London to Istanbul to Dushanbe.  The one thing that didn’t make it was K’s stroller.  We leave the luggage area and are stopped by another airport staff person who checks our baggage claim tickets against our suitcases and lets us through to the next station, the security machine.  M empties the first trolley and heads over to the other side while K and I wait on the other side with the second trolley.  I offload the suitcases one by one onto the machine and begin to head over to the other side to retrieve them when I am stopped by K’s insistence to put his blanket through the machine.  And now it’s finally time, about 2 hours after landing at the airport, where we are greeted by M’s brothers and go outside.  “This is Tajikistan” I say to Kimran who is holding onto his blanket, sucking his thumb and taking everything in.