| 120 VISAS PLEASE! (David Short) | |
In a previous story, I related how I was enabled to book various flights at
short-notice to travel and meet up with an educational Bookship. While
sailing with them from the Solomon Islands to Papua New Guinea, I discovered
that there had been a change in their next port of entry into the Philippines - the country they planned to visit after PNG. This meant that all the passports needed new visas to be stamped in them. How could this be actioned and by whom? The contact in the PNG Government who had been assisting them previously was now on leave. Thus they were looking for another person to guide this process safely to conclusion. I began to realise that maybe I was "that person". Although I had only been on the vessel for a couple of days - originally intending to spend about a month onboard - I felt that I should offer to assist with this assignment. I knew the people and the capital well, and also could speak Pidgin English, the second language in the country.
Once in the capital city, carrying all 120 passports of the crew and staff. I visited the Embassy of the Philippines. They were apologetic as the required application forms had been exhausted and new ones would only arrive in a week's time on the regular flight from Manila. Thinking creatively I enquired if they would accept duplicated copies, if I could arrange for some to be printed. This, I was assured would be fine for the staff onboard the vessel but the crew would need to have the official crew-visa form which was a large size and not possible to print. However, I agreed to have a photocopy made of the crew-visa form and off I went to commence the production.
The duplication of the staff visa application forms was fairly straightforward. It just took time. The crew-visa was another matter!! I searched high and low to locate a store that would photocopy such a large form and at last found one. However, although they were well able to tackle the task, as they were mapmakers - their machine was faulty and would not speedily be functional again. However, I was able to photocopy it in sections and cellotape them together, trusting that the officials at the Embassy would accept this. They did!!
The next task was filling out all the application forms for the staff on the vessel and signing them all on behalf of the Captain, with an accompanying authority letter from him. A small team of three of us, worked into the night to completed the assignment. In the morning, all the documents were submitted and accepted. After a couple of days, we were able to collect the passports again with the relevant visas in them. A job well done and the Embassy were pleased to have the extra copies we printed as well as the master-stencil. Obtaining visas every few 2-3 weeks for the ship's company is a colourful challenge, each application calling for fresh creativity and
generous amounts of time.
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