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Toketemu October 9th Day 18 Cote d'Ivoire

An Unwelcoming Welcome

It starts at the border.

Getting your passport stamped at the Ivorian side of the border at Elubo is a pretty simple process. You walk in, do a biometric registration and then go over to get the passport stamped. No fees required. It becomes harder when officers start yelling orders at you in a language you don’t understand.

I go in first to get my biometric registration done, then Tosin who is travelling with an ECOWAS passport. She is taken aside to go through a different process. Even though she speaks the language, French, I notice she is becoming frustrated while trying to communicate with them.

Fu’ad and Kayode come in next. They are not-so-politely told to take a seat. After getting my registration done, I make my way to get my passport stamped. An official walks in, and without asking any questions, asks me to go back to the sitting area. When I try to explain, I get yelled at.

So I return to where Fu’ad and Kayode are seated. My passports is collected and given to the officer doing the Biometric registration. I explain again that I already went through that process. They hand me my passport and direct me to go stamp it. The officer who barred me before was nowhere to be found.

Coming straight out of Nigeria, this won’t have fazed me. Government officials in Nigeria are constantly rude and abrupt and you can expect a little show of power at every point in a similar process. But we have just come from the Ghana side of the border, where the officers are almost too polite. We have also just spent a week in Ghana with the warmest and most welcoming people. Coming off that to interact with angry French men yelling at you in rapid-fire French for absolutely no reason at all is a little disconcerting. I chalk it up to the language barrier. Trying to communicate with someone who doesn’t speak the same language you do can be a little frustrating.

The Ivorian border is also the first border that has been free of ‘agents’. There are no palms to grease; no bribes are asked for. When they ask us to pay for a Meningitis vaccination, the Nigerian in me asks if I can just pay and skip the whole ‘needle getting stuck in my arm part’. My gracious offer is declined.

Leaving the border and going into Abidjan, we get stopped at least eight times in a one hour window. At the first stop, Captain Taiwo is asked to bring down all of our bags and open them. 10 minutes later, we are stopped again, the doors at the back of the bus flung open and a torch pointed in. It’s due process, I thought. Wasn’t I the same person who complained about the Togo customs check which involved two pats on a box.

Like with the absence of agents and hands to grease, getting stopped every minute shows one thing: Ivorians love due process.

The unwelcome welcome — masked as glaring brashness, shouting officials, no hands to grease, etc. — follows us all the way to our hotel. If there’s one place where you expect customer service to be top-notch, it’s from people in the hospitality business. This isn’t the case at the hotel.

As we try to explain to the manager that the rates she is offering us differ from the online booking site we found the hotel on, she says they no longer associate with the booking site and offers up no other information. Even with her body language, the message is clear: you either take it or leave it. She makes no move to resolve the conflict and no other information as to why they no longer use the booking site but remain listed on it. But we are tired and having spent the previous night in a shoddy hotel with no WiFi, we take it and naively expect better service once we pay. It doesn’t happen.

These experiences only stand out for me because we’ve been to three other countries where the most animosity we’ve experienced is well-masked condescension. If we were coming into Ivory Coast straight from Nigeria I’d feel no need to be writing this right now.

Are Ivorians just cautious of foreigners or unwelcoming? Today as we make our way through town and interact with more locals, I’ll try to find an answer to this question.


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