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.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment