Author: tompepinsky

OK, so I (JM) promise that this will be the last post involving educational visas.  I can’t help thinking every single day as these students come in trying to figure out how to fill out all the forms, find nonexistant immunization records, and figure out how to get their bank to translate their funds into dollars that I’m so lucky to be American.

A girl came in today and she told me that she had overstayed a tourist visa in the US about 7 years ago.  There’s a place on the visa form where you are supposed to state if you have ever violated the terms of a US visa before, and she wanted to know if she had to report herself.  This brought up an interesting tidbit of information from my co-worker.  You have to state on the form if you have ever visited the US on a visa before.  If you have, you have to show them the old visa in your passport.  That means if it was issued in an expired passport you have to dig that passport out of the back of the closet and pray that the little flimsy piece of paper that is a visa is still attached.  If you cannot produce this old visa, you will never get a visa to visit the States again. Period.  Well unless you try getting a police report that says your old passport was stolen.  If a visa is missing, they assume it has been removed and sold on the black market (yes there is a black market for visas).  But they never tell people this when they give them their visas, so people can really run into difficulties if they lose track of old documents.  Last year, some KL VIP’s wife and daughter were flatly denied new visas because their old ones had fallen out of their passports and were missing.  They came to our office, where the son’s visa fell out of his passport while someone was handling it.  Only with some serious intervention were they able to get new visas.  Oh, and when they went back to the Embassy, someone said "yeah, we had a whole batch in ’95 or something when the glue didn’t take."  So if you know any foreigners who have been in US, left, and plan to come back, tell them to keep track of their old visas.

The other interesting thing was that I had a family come in where the girl wanted to go to public high school in the states.  You can do this on a foreign passport, but you are only allowed to come for one year.  And before you get a visa, you have to show that you have fully paid the school for their average cost of educating a student for a year.  This can be up to $10,000.  I’d say you might as well go to a private high school, but $10,000 is cheap compared to what they charge these days.

Administrative hagglings continued today as I (TP) journeyed down to the southern fringes of KL to deal with my accepted application to UKM.  It’s nice that they admitted me after a month.  I wonder what they expected me to be doing for the past 30 days.  I guess this is one of those bureaucratic deals where they pretend I don’t exist just so long as I don’t make any waves.  Sort of like Milton in Office Space, at least until I burn the country down.

I have a theory that the amount of paperwork that you put into a bureaucracy is equal and proportional to the amount of new paperwork that you receive from a bureaucracy.  I give them application, they give me sheets I have to fill out.  I give them sheets, they give me more sheets.  I have an appointment for April 8th to discuss visa issues.  We will have been in the country for over 45 days (less the amount of time we spend in New Zealand).  Good thing we are not politically sensitive visitors or anything.  For what it’s worth, I now have a fourth university ID with my picture on it to show around (to add to Brown, Yale, and Wisconsin),  only this one has funny-looking words on it.

I got another nice taste of "I don’t understand what’s going on" today while waiting for campus buses.  As we mentioned before, UKM’s campus is something like a giant humid desert.  Walking anywhere is sort of like Dr. Zhivago in the tropics.  I had to walk from the Pusat Pengajian Siswazah (Graduate Student Registrar) to the Wisma Aman (Safety Center), a distance of about a mile.  No way I’m doing that.  Fortunately, they have buses to take people from building to building–no one else likes to walk around there either.  Yet the buses refused to stop for me.  I even asked people to show me where the buses stop, and the buses just blasted on past.  I think it’s because I was the only one waiting (no Malaysians), although I’m not sure why the bus drivers would be so reluctant to pick up a sweaty, frazzled, soon-to-be-sunburnt foreigner.  Fortunately, though, one of the security folks saw me making mean faces at a bus as it roared past, and gave me a ride on his motorcycle.  That’s the way to travel.

You may notice that we added a picture of Sinta, one of our wayang golek that we bought in Jakarta.  It’s a nice way to liven up the front page.