Hello, it's Michaela writing again! This time I wanted to tell about some troubles we have with the police here.
Two weeks ago another MFS student, let's call her "Girl from Gothenburg", was returning back home to Sweden after having done fieldwork here for a similar seagrass project. When she was about to get on the ferry to Dar Es Salaam she got in trouble with customs when she told them she was a student for Institute of Marine Sciences, while she was here on a tourist visa, which me, Floriaan and Elisa also are. For this reason the immigration officers confiscated her passport, but she tried to take back her passport from the officer. This made the officers very angry and Gothenburg Girl then called a PhD student, who is the supervisor of two other Swedish MFS students and lives with them in the same apartment as us, for help. The PhD student who was in the harbor doing interviews with fishermen for her research came to help Gothenburg Girl. Unfortunately, when they were talking to the officers the PhD student’s tape recorder, which she had been using during her interview with a fisherman, started recording the conversation from her pocket and when she tried to switch it off the officers noticed the recorder, accused her of espionage, confiscated her recorder and demanded a trial. There was big excitement at IMS and I, Floriaan and Elisa who at that time were in the lab at IMS working with our seagrass samples, saw immigration officers on scooters surrounding the entrance of the institute. Gothenburg Girl, who I had been taking out money for since she had lost her ATM card a few weeks earlier, asked me to help take out more money for her so she could buy a new passport. I and she then sneaked out of IMS, jumped into a taxi to the ATM, I took out money for her, and she managed to buy a new passport and instead took a small airplane from Zanzibar to mainland and was safe in Sweden the next day.
The day after everything happened; the PhD student went to court, where she for five hours got interrogated by six shouting police officers. They accused her among other things to be hiding that Gothenburg Girl might still be on Zanzibar. Luckily, the PhD student knows the son of Zanzibar’s former president, and as soon as he heard about what happened and came in to the room the officers released her and she got her recorder back. Unfortunately, Gothenburg Girl departure made the immigration officers very suspicious against students that stay on Zanzibar for a longer period and (when I, Floriaan and Elisa weren’t at home) two immigration officers came to our apartment and demanded that the other MFS students show all their documents. They also asked if more students were living here but they said no, which is good, and the officers left the apartment only a few minutes before we came home to the apartment for a lunch break. The PhD student and her MFS students had to pay $150 each for residence permits, but since me, Floriaan and Elisa only had a few weeks left on Zanzibar IMS wanted to keep things quiet around us. Our supervisor said that we’ll “survive for three weeks”. So, since the PhD student and the MFS students were already “caught”, for the past two weeks me Floriaan and Elisa have been pretending to be normal tourists and looking at flights from Zanzibar, instead of the ferry, for our return journey. A couple of days ago, our supervisor at IMS told us that the immigration officers have increased security all over Zanzibar and that even taking a plane won’t be without trouble. So now we have “turned ourselves in” to Immigration and paid for residence permits, $200 each, although we leave Zanzibar next week. According to Sida and the Swedish consulate on Zanzibar this expence is wrong, since we are not researchers, only doing our Master thesises here, and tourist visas are legally correct. However we figured that it is safer to buy the permits and avoid trouble than risk missing our flight in Dar Es Salaam and getting into trouble with immigration.
Cheers!
Michaela
