Tag Archives: Passports

Crossing the Kyrgyz Uzbek Border

Osh Andijan Kyrgyz Uzbek Border

“No, no, no. This is not right!”
The female border guard admonished me in stern tones, dismissively tossing my completed customs form into her trash basket.
My temper at the petty bureaucracy flared. Ire duly raised, I opened and then quickly closed my mouth. Best not to antagonize. The object was, after all, to get through this border crossing, not to be shooed back to Kyrgyzstan.

The woman was in her late twenties, maybe early thirties with manicured hands and painted nails. She had obviously spent time on her hair and makeup before coming to work. She was pretty and looked stylish in her uniform. Even though she was bugging me to my back teeth right then, I felt a little sad for her, the very definition of all dolled up and nowhere to go.

I sighed, took another blank form and started copying out my passport details for the third time.
As my hand wrote out the familiar information, I felt more like an observer than a participant. I wondered what her life was like, as the only woman at this rural border crossing between Osh (Kyrgyzstan) and Andijan (Uzbekistan). Was her sternness with me a Central Asian version of a woman trying to be better than her male co-workers?
On cue, a guffaw echoed across the partition from the office next door where, it seemed, my husband was holding court with the male border guards.

“OK. Here you go.” I handed over the new form.
She started to review. I passed the neatness check (yay!) and she asked for my passport (yes, you read that right, there was a neatness check before a data check).

“This cannot be!”
She stared at me, this time definitely suspicious that I was going out of my way to cause trouble.
“What?”
“Your passport is from Ireland. Why have you written America as your country? That is not possible.”
“I live in America.”
“No. You cannot have a passport from one country and live in another.”
Another open mouth, close mouth goldfish impression from me. I really didn’t know how best to play this one.
At this point, I think she decided I wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Decisively, she struck out AMERICA on my form and wrote in IRELAND for me. With a flourish she tore off my copy and dropped it in front of me imperiously.
“You can go.”
“OK. Can I take my stuff?”
(Call me cautious, but I thought it best not to make any assumptions at this point).
She nodded. She was done with me.

It took me a good five minutes to gather all my belongings and re-pack my bag.
I went outside and took a seat on the wall between my boys. I could see Murph still in animated discussion with his new best friends – and still making them laugh.
He saw me sitting on the wall, said something to his buddies and came running over, cheerily calling “just two minutes” back to the guards while saying “I need the kid’s passports” to me. But when he stood in front of me he hastily reached under his shirt and palmed our four U.S. passports into my hand.
“We can’t let them find these, it’ll just be too complicated.”
And then he was gone.

I made a show of standing my (checked, cleared) pack up and tightening the straps with one hand while hiding the offending passports through a hidden side zip with the other.
“Mom! What are you doing?” BigB asked, just a touch too loudly.
“Nothing, nothing sweetie, what are you reading?”
Distraction, a parent’s greatest tool – in any situation.

Finally we were done. Start to finish it had only taken two whole hours to pass into Uzbekistan.

We compared notes are we walked down the road. Murph made fun of me when I told him how the woman had commanded that I must live in Ireland. I couldn’t understand how he’d managed to get away with having an Irish passport and a U.S. address. I figured it must have been because he’d made them laugh. “Humor wins again”, I thought.

Two weeks later we were at Tashkent airport leaving Uzbekistan. Murph pulled out his papers and realized that the Country of Residence on his form has been changed too – he just hadn’t noticed :)

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Crossing the Iran-Iraq Border II: At the Border

Euphorbia, tenacious and growing recklessly on the lower reaches of the steep hillsides by the side of the road, leaves glaring green in this dry, mountainous desert heat. Allium, like over-sized purple dandelion seed-heads, a border of color looking completely out of place in this forbidding landscape. Nothing left in shorn fields of recently cut wheat or grass but a golden stubble. Every so often our bus passed a field where people were cutting their crop with hand tools, entire family groups, the women mostly in full hijab. We were on our way from Iran to Iraq but I felt as if our trajectory, though ostensibly west, over the Zagros Mountains, had also taken us back in time.

So this was the Iran-Iraq border. The pleasant bucolic, agrarian scenes outside my bus window so totally at odds with the sadness and death I associated with this area. Half a million people were killed in a six year-long war over this very territory, something which still impacts people’s lives in this area, and indeed, global politics to this very day.

The bus pulled on to the actual border crossing. We climbed out, blinking in the sun, our feet squelching in the mud from the construction site where the new, multi-lane border post was being built. We followed our bus-mates to the current border checkpoint. Ah yes, another addition to the “101 Uses of a Shipping Container” series. There was a door, firmly closed, and a young man in uniform at the single window on one side.

Reviewing our current situation: here we were, in Somewhere, Iran, hoping to walk across the border into Iraqi Kurdistan. We didn’t know if we needed visas. If we were turned back we didn’t know if we’d be able to get a bus back to Sanandaj. All four passports in hand, I joined the group of people crowding around the window, giving my husband one last “I can’t believe we’re doing this” eye-roll.

Murph was a minor celebrity among the jostling crew. There was a truck-driver from Azerbaijan who had some English and was full of questions about who we were and what we were doing right here, right now. Murph played to the crowd:
“We’re just passing through. Yes, we’re backpacking, yes, those are our boys. Yes, we just spent a couple of weeks exploring Iran. No, we’re not on a tour.”
 I was too preoccupied watching the border guard puzzle over one of our passports, making multiple phone calls (to whom?) to pay my husband’s camaraderie with random truck-drivers much attention – but it was a handy distraction.

Then one by one the passports were handed back over the heads of waiting locals and we were waved on. We walked through the concrete arch of the in-progress new construction to another steel box – this time with three windows – to have our passports and bags checked by the Iraqis.

Some bright spark had decided to put a plexi-glass cover over the waiting area on this side, obviously not realizing that in doing so he had created a sauna in the desert. If my children could have stripped to their undies I think they probably would have done so.

For some reason the atmosphere on the Iraqi side of the border was positively relaxed. People commiserated about the heat and stood in orderly lines. My kids were beyond any jovial chatter so I made faces at a little kid waiting with his parents beside us. His Dad, who we learned was an English teacher and a translator, pointed out that since we were in Iraq I could take my headscarf off now. I nearly kissed him.

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What Does Nationality Mean Today?

Where Are You From? This innocuous question, frequently asked during our travels has led me to ponder, possibly too deeply, what national identity means. So today I’m going to indulge in a little navel-gazing on this subject – feel free to check out now if this is not your cup of tea.

When someone asks me “Where are you from?”, I usually reply “I’m Irish, but I live in Seattle”. The typical response is something like “I thought you were American” usually said in the tone of “I knew it was Colonel Mustard in the Library with the candlestick” since I, accent-chameleon that I am, have only a shadow of a brogue left in my speech. (I have lived in the US for the past fifteen years and I have US citizenship.)

We’ve met other expats with similar life stories on our travels. On a winery tour in Argentina, we met a friendly German who told us he was from Hamburg only to later share that he’d been living in Brazil for over forty years. On the same tour we met a much older couple with the sharpest New York accents that I have ever heard. It turns out that the wife was born in and had lived her whole life in that great city but her husband was Argentinian and had immigrated to New York in his twenties. He didn’t correct our initial assumption that he was American. I can attest that sometimes I don’t correct people either since, for a brief conversation with someone you may never meet again, the explanation is just not worth the hassle.

But, my nationality is not my accent. It is not where I choose to live, work, vote and pay taxes (and unlike some, I do vote and I value the right to do so). I will likely never describe myself as American because, being an expat, I don’t consider myself American.

All of which has led me to consider, what does cause me to identify myself as Irish? It’s hardly language since the only Gaelic I know is the little I learned in school. Music and literature are important in Ireland and there are plenty of both in our house but books and songs alone seem insubstantial. Guinness does not a cultural tradition make and Ireland has great seafood but nothing like the strong culinary identity of say, France. I think it’s fair to say that national customs are important but nebulous. The weight of any one thing, whether it’s food, dance or sport, depends not only on the country in question but also on personal interest and participation.

I grew up in Ireland, moving to the U.S. when I was 24. Having lived there is very important but I haven’t lived there in 15 years and, as any long-term expat knows, countries change. My experience of Ireland is very different to the Irish college kids who we met at a hostel in Peru. After all, they were about twenty years younger than me and had spent their teen years in an affluent country enjoying the benefits of the Celtic Tiger whereas I remember an economically very weak country with rampant unemployment.

Here’s a thought: “Is history the key factor?” Certainly I can give chapter and verse on the various wars and rebellions that make up Irish history. History as a driver of national identity would also account for my children passionately choosing to describe themselves as American – even as they present Irish passports at borders. They have adopted the stories they’ve learned about the Pilgrims and the heroes of the American Revolution as their own.

We’ll soon be visiting Vietnam. Is there a better example of where nationality and history crash together in a way which will influence what we see and do while visiting somewhere? Whether you travel with your children or not I believe that as a parent today, you need to educate your child not only about your country and culture but also, with nuance and feeling, about how your country has behaved on the world stage.

I believe that nationality still matters. I believe that history is an important part of national identity. Do you?

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