Let me say right off the bat….this is a long post, sorry but it tells a story.
As I wrote yesterday we had a few ups on our recent trip to Nairobi with one down. After getting the issue with KP&L taken care of Chuck got on the phone with the NGO council. We had changed our mailing address back in April and they had sent us mailings to the new address. But then they sent a couple things to the old address and we wanted to get it straightened out. We thought since we’re going to Nairobi let’s try to get it handled while there….which is really a high hope since normally one item takes an entire day to deal with. But thankfully God allowed the KP&L situation to be handled quickly. So, Chuck called the NGO council, talked to someone about the situation and the person on the line said “send us a copy of the official stamped letter showing we had accepted the change of address.” Chuck hesitantly asked “can I send it via email?” “Sure, here’s our email address.” Done with in less than two minutes! Whoa God you are really blessing this trip aren’t you!?
Ok, so we didn’t have to go to the NGO council let’s head to the phone store to get an account issue settled. That was settled quickly too! This was a bit much for me and I could hardly believe what was happening! Then it was onto Immigration to renew our alien resident cards. That’s when the tide turned!
We knew we needed two passport photos of us so before heading to Immigration we stopped at a photo shop, got our pictures taken and printed and went into Immigration. Chuck found the correct forms, filled them out and we were next in line!. The officer looked at our photos and told us they had to be on white background….now we had looked at the example photos IMMIGRATION has on their website for renewal and it was on a blue background and no where in the instructions does it say white background. She refused to go any further until we get a white background.
Ok, we leave Immigration and on the direction of their people go to the kiosk downstairs to get our pictures taken. They direct us to a guy who walks us across the street to a bus stop….what the heck? He puts us in the corner, another person holds up a white sheet and takes our photo! We are told to go back to Immigration where he’ll meet us with the photos. We wait, and wait, and wait. Finally we go back to the kiosk and tell them we’ve waited 45 minutes and no photos. They call, the guy comes back with the photos and wants to charge us double what we paid at the first photo shop. We tell him take 200/ksh or take the pictures. He says he is sorry, like that makes everything perfectly ok now, but we hand him the photos and walk away…toward the first photo shop. He catches us and says ok, 200/. We pay and head back to Immigration.
Again, we are next in line (thank you Lord) and she barely looks at the photos and says “it’s supposed to be on a white background”. We tell her it is….nope it looks blue to her! But it’s your people who sent us here! Nope, but you can go in back and talk to my boss. We go back and look for “the boss”. When we find him he gruffly says “what do you want?” “to talk to you about our pictures”. “Wait until I call you.” We sit and wait….about 20 minutes later he walks by us asking what we want. We tell him it’s about our pictures and without even looking at the pictures he says “white background, white background, white background.” Chuck says “but….” “white background” and walks away. Oh yeah, both of us were about ready to slap someone, the arrogance and rudeness of this guy was over the top. But we got up, left and went to talk to the “bus stop photographers”. They agreed to take another set and when they returned with them they looked exactly like the previous photos…white sheet but with a blue tint (I’m guessing their printer just couldn’t print a pure white). He tells us take them back and they’ll accept them this time….are you kidding me? No we want a white background and if you can’t do it then someone else will.
Ok, ok, let’s go to our photo shop and have them put in a white background. We head about two blocks away and up four flights of stairs to a tiny room with two computers. He takes our pictures, photoshops in a white background, prints it off and we are satisfied.
Whew…now back to immigration. It’s lunch time but someone is supposed to be on duty at all times in immigration and believe it or not there is someone there to help us. We give her our items, she looks intently at all the paperwork (to me it seems she’s looking for something to nail us on) but finally stamps it and gives us a receipt. Yahoo! Now to wait for the paperwork to be processed and we then need to be fingerprinted.
We wait another 45 minutes to an hour, we are called back, fingerprinted and told to come back in approximately six weeks to pick up our new cards! We are done!!
It’s now about 4:30 pm, we haven’t had lunch and honestly we are done with Nairobi. We head to a supermarket, have lunch/dinner, get a few supplies and we are on our way home. So you see I am thankful for the quick resolutions early in the day because without those we would have never been able to finish at Immigration. Lord there’s the silver lining…thank you for working it out according to Your will (apparently we are supposed to have our alien resident cards renewed plus we have LOTS of extra passport photos for any other minor filings where the background doesn’t matter!)