78uuu lumière des étoiles

Dusty:Starlight:Culture



Tanzania it is, then.
2008-04-27   10:07 p.m.

The government of the United Republic of Tanzania, or at least the most honorable consul general and emissary himself, would like to see my bank account records or most recent pay stub to prove I have "SUFFICIENT FUNDS TO MAINTAIN" myself "WHILE IN TANZANIA". The all-caps sentence comes courtesy of the Tanzanian Visa application PDF. If I didn't have to do this for Ghana, Tunisia, Zambia, or other places which 1)require US passport holders to get a Visa for entry and 2)have economies stable enough to worry about an influx of fleeing migrants overstaying their welcome and draining the social welfare system with their insufficient funds, why do I have to do it now?

I am a gluttonous and spoiled brat for complaining about this. But understand my relative paranoia: even if I black out any sensitive account or personal identification numbers with a nice thick sharpie, I still don't want my paperwork floating around a consulate or state department office. I just don't.

The other item of concern on the visa application form: "VISAS FOR RESEARCH AND JOURNALISM WILL ONLY BE GRANTED AFTER THE APPLICANT HAVE (subject-verb agreement!) BEEN CLEARED BY THE COMMISSION". So... let's say one is going to Tanzania just to go to Tanzania, to take a Safari through the Serengeti and Ngorngoro and trek Mt. Meru, to hang out on Zanzibar's beaches and check out Dar's petty theft scene. But let's also say one is keen to do some prep work for her dissertation, trying to case out Women's NGOs that happen to make use of various technologies to perform and implement their mission. Let's say one might just interview a few willing people and see if she can use some data she gets from "participant observation" or "structured conversations" for writing an article or two or, say, a future grant proposal. Does this make one a "journalist"? A "researcher"? Or a student-tourist whose curious about the world?

I'm supposing that if I don't quite know what I'm looking for (ok, I do, a bit, but I'm still not even close to my quals so my dissertation topic remains an in-process mystery), I'm not "researching" anything. And I'm not going under the auspices of the university that employs me nor the university I attend as a student. So I'm just floating around, happening to talk to people here and there to find some stuff out for some undefined future purpose loosely connected with my work, right? There's no box for that on the PDF I can check off.

I would LOVE to get a ton of research done this summer - especially as there are some days I wonder how, if I'd like to have a baby sometime soon, I'm to get back to East, West, Southern or Northern Africa to do research when I am ready to collect empirical findings on ICT development in Africa and its correlation (or lack thereof) to the progress of NGO and civil society work aimed at improving women's lives. I suppose I could go, Steve could stay here, and I can air-mail breast milk or whatever.

Yep. Maybe I won't have a baby sometime soon.

Or maybe I'll tote my family around West Africa five years from now. Or maybe I'll research something easier and less time consuming.