I’m planning to take some time off around the end of December to spend part of the holidays in Cairo. To leave the country you need and exit visa and then a new entry visa to return. Getting these will be much easier once I get my Residency Visa, which I have to do anyway now that I’ve been here for nearly a month. We have a guy at the office who arranges all this, but there are two things I need to furnish: proof from an in-country test that I do not have HIV and a letter from my embassy giving me permission to stay here.
Neither process was simple. I learned in Egypt that for things like this the only thing you can really plan ahead of time is how to get to wherever you need to go. Once there, well, no one tells you what to do. You just have to figure it out. Being prepared with all your documents makes things easier though. Thankfully I brought an extra bunch of passport photos to Yemen with me.
Saturday morning (the first day of the work week here) I decided to do the blood test. I walked out the front gate of the College and hopped a motorcycle taxi. Before I knew it I was standing at the gates of the Ministry for General and Residential Health – National Center for Public Health Laboratories. The whole block was lined with a high concrete wall on the left-hand side of the street, broken only by the entry gate. A small portion of the wide entrance was open, allowing only single-file traffic in and out. Armed guards stood next to the door (don’t make too much of the armed guards: in places like Yemen and Egypt just about any large public facility is guarded in this manner). Unsure of what else I was supposed to do, I gave the guard a glance and walked in.
The gates opened to a large, clean, and green courtyard. A sign to the right pointed to Coffee. I figured the front doors were my best bet. The entry hall was pretty much your standard waiting area. All white walls and tiles, people sitting in chairs and a number of lines formed at the clerk windows. I tried the line marked “Reception,” as this seemed to be the obvious choice for a first-time visitor. Everyone had receipt-like papers in their hands, and I wondered if I needed one too. Where do you get them? Then a man pointed me away from Reception. Apparently I was supposed to go straight to the Cashier window. Who knew?
I got in line and defended my spot, as is normal, and paid my 6,500 Riyals when I got to the front. The clerk flipped through my passport and eyed my extra passport-sized photos before filling out and handing me a slip of paper.
After asking around a bit I figured out which hall to go down for the blood test. Three twenty-somethings stood joking in Arabic at the doorway to the exam room, where a half-square of school desks was arranged behind a reception table. A nurse checked everyone’s forms and labeled their sample tubes. The kids at the doorway (I couldn’t accurately call them men) seemed a mischievous bunch, not in a Fred and George sort of way but in a d-bag sort of way. Anyway the moment passed and an official-looking figure at the doorway took my passport photos, not before guessing if I was Bosnian, and gave me a number.
The fifteen or so chairs arranged around the doorway hosted a variety of people. Pakistanis, East Asians, veiled Arab women, Indonesians. I wondered what had brought them all to Yemen and realized that I too would seem somewhat of an anomaly in their eyes. I made a game of trying to see which people filled out their forms in Arabic and which filled theirs out in English, and if possible, reading their nationalities.
Before too long my number was called. The nurse at the table filled out my forms and handed me a vile. I sat down in one of the desks and took off my pullover and rolled up my sleeves and waited. A man shortly came over and scrubbed the inside of my elbow. I looked to the side and waited. I barely felt anything before so many milliliters my own blood filled the vial and it was finished. The walk back to work helped me shake off the nerves and I was done. For the second time in a year and a half I voluntarily got stuck with a needle in an Arab country. The setting in Yemen though was much less sketchy than the vaccine clinic in Cairo. While that experience gave me the temporary adrenaline high of getting three vaccines for $28 in a make-shift clinic set up in an un-used hotel, most of my excitement from this Yemeni experience derived from the fact that I could now move on with the Residency Visa registration process and get that much closer to making my return to Cairo a reality.
***
Today I made the return trip to pick up the results. This time I knew the way to the Health Center and just walked. I entered the building once more and thought for sure that this was when I would present my receipt to the clerk at Reception. I was wrong. After asking where I go to get my results, I was pointed down a different hallway than the one before. Down there I asked someone use for further directions and they pointed me outside.
Surely this must be wrong. But sure enough there it was. A sign labeled Results hanged over a small window in a building on the perimeter, like the concession stand at a park. I handed in my receipt and after some rummaging had my results. Thankfully I am HIV negative and eligible for residency.
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