Staff Blog

A couple of weeks ago, I embarked on a journey to the southern Congo DRC with two other great guys, Dave Hoyme and Jacob Schwertfeger. Here is a brief summary of our border crossing into the Congo.

We traveled on bus, which took us 2 days to get from Livingstone Zambia to where we were ministering in the Congo. A friend of ours set us up with a contact to go with us and interpret for us during our time in the Congo. When we arrived at the border we met up with our interpreter Gaston, as well as got bombarded by a group of 7 or 8 guys trying to get us to hire them to take us across the border.

We continued on with Gaston leaving all but one man from the group behind, this guy just kept following us. We exited Zambia problem free. The 5 of us now walked across the border to the Congo side for entry. It was under construction so the actual entry place where they stamp your passport was this little shack looking thing off to the side. So the 5th guy who just started following us started to tell us everything we need.

I don’t remember his name, it sounded pretty muslim, but he told us later that we could refer to him as Rick Ross because this is the rapper from the states that he claimed to look like. So we listened to him, Gaston said it was a good idea and that we should give our passports to him. So he and Gaston led the way up to the shack. We walk in and its dark, just one computer, a book keeper, and a few random people sitting inside. They start talking to us in French and from there Rick Ross took over for us.

They started right away with drilling us with questions about everything to see if we had missed anything. The first issue we had was that we had no letter of invitation. The embassy in Zambia took it from us when we got our visas. Since we didn’t have a copy they already started in on the bribes. Rick argued for us for about 10 minutes. He used the fact that we were missionaries as a strong arguing point in the conversation. From there, the book keeper lady closed our passports in her book and just looked up at us. After that we were ushered out the door by Rick Ross to his own personal barber shop around the corner.

He told us the story and how we were going to have to pay 20 dollars a piece to get through the border, and how we couldn’t be the ones to do it or we would have to pay 100 dollars a piece just because we were white. So he disappears with 90 dollars from us, the extra 30 being for the head officers to allow it to happen and the rest for getting our passports stamped. An hour later Rick Ross and Gaston showed up and said that we had more problems. I didn’t have my yellow fever booklet and they had issues with Dave’s. 

Dave had another paper that had his yellow fever shot on it. I had forgotten mine back in Zambia. So now I had to go get a yellow fever shot. As soon as I walked in with Rick and Gaston there was a woman demanding money from me. Rick started arguing with her. He was loud and ripping our passports out of her hands and grabbing things on her desk, I thought he would get in trouble for sure but they let it happen. It came down to me having to pay 50 dollars for another yellow fever shot. So I did. After that she demanded another 20 dollars.

After another 20 minutes of arguing we finally agreed on that. So I go back to get my shot, and the guy that is about to give me the shot doesn’t even know what he is doing! After he messed up the first attempt of getting the shot set up I took it from Him and did it for him. They then asked me if I was a doctor as well. So Rick immediately said I was and started calling me a doctor. Then they asked me so I quickly said I am trained in this sort of medical stuff and went on preparing the shot. So I got everything set up for the guy so that all he had to do was push it into my arm.

After that we finally got everything settled, I got a new yellow fever card, and then found all or our passports and collected them and went back to Rick’s barber shop. Jake and Dave were waiting for us there. We paid Rick 30 dollars for all of the help, because he actually was a big help. It was as if we had our own lawyer with us to battle everything out and make sure we didn’t get ripped off. We found out that Gaston had to pitch in 20 dollars for a bribe somewhere along the way as well. Then we were finally on our way!