Embassy Games

IT'S FUN BEING AN EXPAT BUSINESSMAN only until your children get thrown into a hell-hole Chinese jail for the heinous crime of not having the right papers. Well, theoretically speaking.

Every Monday morning my daughter has to present to her class an interesting fact she has researched. It is known as WIDKT (which the kids manage, somehow, to pronounce phonetically), or “Wow, I didn’t Know that” and they usually start off by asking a startling question.

So, to follow the format: did you know that, when you are the minor child of a South African passport holder, the day you turn 16 your passport immediately expires, even if it nominally has an expiry date in 2009?

Here are the facts: you cannot apply for an adult passport without presenting a South African identity document. You cannot apply for an ID before you turn 16, and then you can only do it by physically presenting yourself to an office in South Africa. Then you have to wait six months – at an outside estimate – for your ID book to arrive. Then, and only then, can you apply for an adult passport, which will take another six months to process if the gods of bureaucracy are feeling benign.

Oh, and you can’t apply for a temporary, emergency passport without being in possession of a valid ID either.

Therefore, let’s say you are the child of an expat in, for example, Beijing. On your sixteenth birthday you become an illegal alien and subject to all the judicial remedies that implies – to wit arrest, interrogation and imprisonment. On your following birthday you could turn legal again, if the wheels are all turning smoothly.

Luckily a responsible expat parent would know all of this by instinct and would apply for all the necessary documents on or before the child’s fifteenth birthday, as the gracious and friendly staff at the South African embassy here informed me.

Being a naive, unworldly businessman, I’ve always thought embassies exist to establish diplomatic relations between two countries, relations that can flower into mutually beneficial trade, and to then protect the rights of and assist citizens who find themselves in a foreign country.

It has dawned on me that, instead, embassies exist primarily to make my life hell. This has been a hard lesson learnt only by spending subjective centuries, mostly in visa queues, at various embassies.

It’s not just the inefficiency, but the multifarious and often creative ways that different countries have found to inflict torture on me. The variety has led me to believe there is a secret event – along the lines of an intra-embassy Olympics – where career diplomats are rated on the average psychological damage they inflict on visitors.

I won’t name the countries involved, for fear of one day being stopped at a border post for a “personal interview” involving latex gloves, but here are some examples of the different visa systems.

Embassy A requires you to make an appointment, usually six to eight weeks in advance. When you receive a reference number, date and time, you are told to arrive exactly five minutes before that scheduled appointment. That, however, is a cruel joke, because all that happens at the appointed time is that your identity is checked and you are allowed into an outer-inner sanctum, where you may queue with 300 other duped applicants in the initial admin line. Then you have to enter the fingerprint queue, then the initial processing queue, then the personal interview queue. The interview consists of a two-minute interrogation, after which you are told to return in five days to collect your passport. Which may or may not have a visa in it.

Embassy B, by contrast, only processes visa applications on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between 09:00 and 11:00. Only one person may enter the embassy at a time; so, after standing in line from 07:00 (and not a moment later if you actually want to make it into the building), a very scary security guard calls you in. He escorts you to a chair where you can examine your reflection in a one-way mirror-window while a voice from a box asks you countless questions. Five days later you are allowed to return (at 07:00) and queue again for your passport, which may or may not contain a visa. If, on either day, you don’t make it inside by the stroke of 11:00, tough.

The one embassy I will name is that of the Russian Federation. I entered that offshoot of the Kremlin at 09:00 to apply for a one-year, multiple-entry visa. I was out at 09:30 for a coffee around the corner and back at 11:00 to collect my passport, visa and all.

So, let’s see, would I rather do business in Country A? or Country B? or perhaps Russia? Back to those WIDKT facts. After further intensive, even feverish research, and with help from some nice folk in South Africa, it emerges that I’m not totally lacking in paternal instincts. Everything I was told by the local embassy was true, except the bit about the passport that suddenly becomes invalid.

There was some celebration around the family dinner table that night, let me tell you.

Until we realised that, some day, we would have to deal with another embassy.