Like monkeys in the garden

A negative HIV test being a requirement for working in Sudan, today was the special day we overseas-hire teachers were supposed to report to the "Aliens' Registration Office" downtown. We had been warned: it will take hours. Bring a book, and water, and even food. The Sudanese bureaucracy is inefficient, they told us. Just be patient.

So we were ready at 9:30 a.m. for our bus to pick us up, and we get a call from the school that it will be 20 minutes late. Twenty minutes come and go. At 10 a.m. we confer with our colleagues at other buildings. The bus is now coming here first, rather than last. They decide to drive/public-transport it to Garden City and meet the bus.

Two of them arrive by car. We wait under the trees, pee again, speculate about monkeys and communicable disease (not in that order). The bus arrives, an hour late. We wait some more for the others to show up by public transport. We get another call: they're already downtown. Shit. We decide to get on the bus, with two cars following.

We leave our street, make a left and a right and another right, and stop, at 11:15 a.m., in front of the Aliens' Registration Office...only 300 yards from our building.

We file inside in silence. Our colleagues have come and gone. I struggle to breathe evenly and eventually get my arm stabbed behind a dingy curtain by a guy with a box of disposable needles and a rapidly filling cardboard tray of foreign blood. We leave the office at 11:30, about 10 minutes after we arrived.

Yeah, the HIV test took a few hours - but Sudanese bureaucrats had nothing to do with it!

Afterwards, in a room darkened by lack of electricity at the gym in Khartoum's only mall, I lifted weights and worried that blood might start spurting out of the needle mark on my arm. Nothing happened. I guess I got lucky this time.