FC: Beijing Olympics PART TWO

PART TWO: The Man in Black (literally)

... In walks a completely plain-clothes guy (jeans, sneakers, black t-shirt, Harley-Davidson cap and zero identification, and also clearly a foreigner) and sits at the computer with my stack of dvds. He doesn’t ask nearly the inane questions as the uniformed guard, but still wants to know the history of the dvd, which I explain was just a gift to beat boredom in the countryside. “Well, this cannot enter China.” (Fine, take it, enjoy the story of the Taj Mahal.)

THEN he starts to look through our IPMP compilation CD (don’t worry Matt, he didn’t ask about your life story!) – just my luck he clicks onto some files about security in relief situations – you know, the usual: bomb threats, armed militias, etc. “Are you a member of a military?” (sigh. No.) “Well, this cannot enter China.” (sigh. This whole CD is just full of materials from my entire school year about every aspect of doing development work.) “And it’s really this dangerous??” (Yeah! Imagine a refugee camp during a war, of course it’s dangerous, we need to know how to stay safe!) He continues on to our fave Voluntary Sector Fund guidelines and very intensely asks, “what’s this??” (This is a fund where the Canadian government gives money for development projects abroad.) “And you think this is positive?” (Yeah! 100% positive!) He kept clicking around the dvd, and I had to also explain 1) the concept of Positive Deviance, 2) PRA charts from Fiji, 3) ToT, etc. I was really laughing inside at this point, but valiantly defending our profession at every turn – which I think convinced Mr. Mysterious to let me keep the CD, hurray!

In the meantime, my rabid jeep driver had been waiting with my fellow passengers for over an hour, which is basically enough to send one of these guys directly to the asylum. I was let out of the room to pay him and let him go – my original guard was actually quite dismayed on my behalf, and promised that they would take me where I needed to go when it was all over (And when would that be…?)

Back in the room, the secret agent guy had moved on to my summertime research – checking all my data on my flash card and in my notebook. I was “accused” with a sidelong glance of knowing Russian (is that bad?) because half the research in my notebook was in Mongol Cyrillic. Anyway, at that point, I think he had become so bored of dried up rivers and daily water usage, that when I happily offered to show him the accompanying faaacsinating photos on my camera, he just decided to wrap it all up, hahaha. Another guard came in with a bottle of water for me, they helped me stuff all my things back into my bags, and arranged an official van to take me to the bus station in town.

So I left the border in a minivan full of uniformed guards, one of their little kids, and the unnamed, unidentified special interrogator. We stopped on the way at an army base, and he got out and merrily strolled onto the premises with nought but a smile to the guards at the gate and the offending dvd in his back pocket(!). I don’t know what security level this guy clears, but I really felt like a VIP Terrorist. How this must have looked to the townsfolk when I got out of that van with all my stuff, with the border guards waving goodbye and telling me to have a good time in Beijing.

Basically, those 2 hours were a strange mix of crazy-scary and extremely courteous. I’d like to see these guys’ training manual for dealing with foreign suspects.

NEXT TIME: More security and more kind people in Beijing