Go With the Flow

I am officially an illegal immigrant of Malawi. When you enter the country you receive a thirty day visa, stamped in your passport. Now this is fine if you’re just here for tourist purposes, but since we’re here for a just a little longer it could be a problem. Today is the end of my thirty days. When I first got here Samantha and I went to the Seventh Day Adventist Union office and applied for my official long term work visa. Well, that was four weeks ago and I am sure that my application is still sitting in a folder in the office. When we went yesterday to talk to the secretary at the Union office she was quite determined in saying that we shouldn’t go down to the visa office and extend my visa. According to her we were supposed to do our long term visa before we left, which Sam and I both tried to do, so if we went down to the visa office it would just alarm them that we are illegally in their country. We’ve given her enough time to get our official visas but she seems to keep making excuses. So on Monday we are suppose to go down to the immigration office with her and she will take care of my tourism visa, until then I am illegal. I am keeping my fingers crossed that it gets taken care of, if not if I leave the country I won’t be able to get back in(which is a slight problem).

Here’s the thing about Malawi; everything is done in their time. Everyone is laid back and have the strong mentality of “no big deal, it will happen when it needs to” or “if it’s not broken don’t fix it.” For example, the family that we are living on their property is having their house renovated. In the states it would probably take about a good 3 weeks or less to accomplish the job they are doing. Here, they are not schedule to be done till the end of October and they started in the middle of August. Samantha and I return from school and all of the workers are just sitting around talking. No one has seemed to have even heard of a work ethic. Now to be fair to Malawi, there are definitely some citizens that work hard and get things done in good time, but it seems to be quite rare. It has taken a lot of getting use to and a lot of frustration dealing with this mentality. Both Sam and I are so use to going out and getting what we need done when it needs to be done. Here we are being taught to go with the flow. Every day we are reminded that everything occurs in “Malawi time” and we can’t do anything to change that.