Wednesday, April 1, 2015

With a Little Help

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      As the director of a private language school in Libya, I always felt bad that the pay and benefits I could offer our teachers were nothing like as good as those enjoyed by the (much less effective) teachers employed at the language school run by the oil companies. However, there was one area in which I took great pride: My ability to arrange exit visas for those of our teachers who wanted to leave the country when we had 3-day weekends. The oil company school’s teachers had as many 3-day weekends as ours had but their administration could never arrange exit visas for such short breaks. Time after time our teachers would get to spend a long weekend in Malta or Tunisia while their oil company school counterparts were unable to leave Libya.
      But at one point in my third year it looked like this one advantage was about to disappear.
      A 3-day weekend was on the horizon and three of our teachers wanted to spend it in Malta. They were fairly new arrivals and they were all very excited at the prospect of hitting the Italian restaurants of Malta and shopping at the Marks and Spencer store there. In the two weeks before the break all these three teachers could talk about was Malta, Malta and more Malta.
      Once I had completed all the necessary paperwork, Mansour (the school’s fixer) took the exit visa applications to the Immigration Office. The applications were rejected. Mansour didn’t know why. The following day I sent him back to try again. The papers were rejected. The next day I sent him there once more, this time accompanied by the school secretary, Ali. The papers were rejected. Neither Mansour nor Ali could tell me why. So the following day – which was just one day before the teachers were due to fly to Malta – I sent Mansour back to Immigration but this time I went with him.
      Mansour and I got to the Immigration Office at 7:00 a.m. and we spent the rest of the morning either waiting in lines or being sent from office to office. Nobody could tell us exactly what was wrong with the applications but every official we spoke with agreed that they could not be approved.
      By noon we had spoken to every immigration officer that we could find and we had to admit defeat. We walked out into the parking lot. Mansour was close to tears. I was about as angry and frustrated as I’d ever been, mainly because I was dreading having to tell the teachers that their Malta trip was off.
      Suddenly Mansour grabbed my arm and dragged me across the parking lot towards a Libyan army officer, who was just getting out of a car. “Abubakr! Abubakr!” he shouted. The officer turned and greeted Mansour warmly. He was Abubakr Younis, the head of the Libyan Army and one of the twelve young officers who had mounted the Libyan Revolution. As luck would have it, he was also an ex-student of our school. Mansour introduced me and then proceeded to explain the problem. I crossed my fingers. 
      “Give me the passports and come with me,” Abubakr said and led us into the Immigration Office.
      I was expecting some kind of discussion between him, us and the Immigration officials. There was no discussion. Abubakr just walked up to the main counter, leaned over and snatched an ink stamp from the official behind the counter. He opened each passport and stamped it. Then he threw the stamp down on the counter, gave me the passports, shook hands with both of us and walked away.
      Mansour was so proud I thought he was going to burst. “Abubakr my friend,” he told me. He kept on repeating it all the way to the school.

      Of course, I didn’t mention any of this to the three teachers. As far as they were knew, the whole process had been routine: They had asked for exit visas and Mansour had popped down to the Immigration Office and picked them up.      
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