Kenya - The Arrivals Terminal of Moi International Airport

"What happened to your passport?"

This wasn't the first time I had been asked this.

"I bring it with me everywhere, it's my only identification so it just got a little... ruined" I retorted, looking hopefully at the Immigrations officer holding my embarassingly frayed and battered Italian passport, with the picture page divided nearly in two.

"This is not valid. I can't stamp this."

I let this digest for a minute.

"I'm sorry -- what are you saying?"

"I can't let you in this country with this, this..." he said dramatically, holding my poor passport up in front of him between the tips of his thumb and index finger, to stress the fact that the state of my passport utterly disgusted him.

Then came the ringer.

"We have to send you back."

Panic sets in.

Back!? 8 hours of flight? My dream of going to Africa? The months of planning that went into this trip?

"No. That's impossible..." I state "I can't go back."

My eyes welled up with tears.

The immigrations officer looked unnerved.

"Step aside"

I was brought into the immigrations office and asked to sit.

The "Immigrations Office" at MOI international airport is two small, dingy, rooms, one inhabited by my disgusted immigrations officer, and the other by someone else, which must do the other half of the work involved here, because they looked awfully short staffed. But then again, I thought -- they only have one runway.

My immigrations officer is rummaging around the room for something and not paying much attention to me.

"There must be something we can do..." I plead, and try to convey through my eyes somehow that fact that I have many EURO notes in my pocket and he would be welcome to as many of them as he would like if he would just stamp my goddamn crappy passport and let me spend my 8 planned days in Kenya. I had never bribed someone in my life, and frankly, I was a little nervous as to how to go about it, as this man looked awfully proud.

He sat down and glanced at me, unconcerned -- then fiddled around his desk for a pen. In his hand I saw a piece of paper with the following line, written in English, across the top:

"NOTICE TO PROHIBITED IMMIGRANT"

I started to get desperate. I can't go home, I say. I can't -- I'd do anything.

I choked a little on the word "anything" -- and Jacopo, my boyfriend who was sitting next to me uncomfortably through all of this (his passport, of course, was brand new and perfectly valid) -- shot me a look of "What?" as well. Later Jacopo would tell me that he noticed the immigrations guy casting long glaring stares at the pair of mirrored Ray-Bans dangling from his shirt collar.

The officer considered us for a moment -- made a great show of comparing mine and Jacopo's passports -- then, with a grunt, began crossing out nearly half of the lines on the "Notice to Prohibited Immigrant" and writing in several lines of his own.

"They should have never given you an entrance visa, otherwise I would not be able to help you. Now I am obliged to help you."

A bit of backstory here. I had purchased my Kenyan entrance visa at the airport in Rome. The Kenyan Embassy had set up a desk in the departures terminal, right next to our tour operators desk -- and it just seemed more convenient to get it done there, before leaving.

Thank, GOD. I think. Thank God we purchased that Visa before leaving.

Jacopo and I were then escorted back to Customs, where we were informed the the passport-checker-guy would "do what he could" for us.

The guy looked me in the eye, stamped the NOTICE OF PROHIBITED IMMIGRANT sheet with an entrance stamp (my passport was too unacceptable to stamp) and said, rather authoritatively,

"Give me 20 euros".

And that's how I was able to pay my way onto Kenyan soil, and Jacopo was able to walk away from the mess with his Ray-Bans intact. Soon I would find out that to get just about anywhere in this country would involve paying, and that 8 days later I would leave this country with my pockets entirely empty.

As we walked out of the airport, two men offered to carry our bags to the bus. Thinking they worked for our tour operator, I gratefully obliged.

Ten feet later, one of the men turns to us, with the big, broad classic Kenyan smile, and asks (in italian, mind you):

"MANCIA?"
("TIP?")