Tuesday came and went, and big surprise. No iqama. So I started to take steps toward the long process of getting out. I called Suleiman and reminded him that he had broken his promise, that there was no iqama, so now I just wanted to leave. I wanted to get my final exit and go. Suleiman insisted it wasn't his fault and that the problem was with my old company and that I needed to talk to them. It was a familiar story. He insisted that if they couldn't make the transfer, they also couldn't make the final exit, so I might as well stay and get paid in the meantime. He makes a good point.
I still called the old company anyway. They told me next Sunday they should be able to do something for sure, but at the moment they couldn't do anything.
I decided I would visit my old friends at the US embassy and see if anything could be done. After all, I had officially resigned from this company in August. It was now mid -October. Surely there was a way to get me out by now. So I made an appointment to see them on Wednesday. Still, I didn't have much faith that they would be able to do anything. After all, they had already told me once before that basically, all the could do was call and nag the company. I was hoping though that since my contract had been over so long ago, they might take my complaint more seriously now.
Luckily, I wasn't teaching yet, so I didn't feel guilty about leaving work early to go to the ministry of labour and start the paperwork for a final exit complaint. By now I was an old pro at getting taxi's and navigating through the lines of Philippine workers to get to the women's office. The woman recognized me and welcomed me back. I get the feeling a lot of people spend months coming and going from this office to get what they need from their employers. She handed me the forms I would need to fill out, which were all in Arabic, and she told me they would need to be filled out in Arabic. She told me they weren't allowed to help translate the paperwork or to fill it out for us. I thanked her and told her I would bring it back filled out tomorrow, inshallah.
By the time I got back to the college, it was nearly time to go, so I couldn't find any of the other English Teachers to help me translate the forms. I figured that I could do my best with Google translate at home, and have them help me fix everything the next day. I made two copies of each form so I could scribble all over one of them and make a rough draft of another and save the original for the final copy. Turns out, most of it was pretty simple to translate. Name, name of company, iqama number, address.... Turns out the hardest part of the form was actually figuring out what it said, but finding the information to make it complete. Addresses here are pretty much non-existent, so I didn't exactly know what to put for the company, let alone my own address. It was pretty frustrating. I also had no iqama, and therefore no iqama number. Crazy. There was a box to list your demands. A teacher from my new now old company who had been through it all before had advised me that I should not only ask for an exit visa, but also a ticket home and payment for the time since August I had been waiting. I thought that was kind of extreme especially since I had been working in the meantime, though they didn't know that. She explained that it gave you bargaining room. In the end I would probably only get the ticket and the final exit, but that way they would feel like they still came out ahead, and I would get a ticket home. Sounded like good advice.
The next day was Wednesday and the women at work were impressed with my Arabic writing. I was sure it wasn't any better than the average first graders, but I was still flattered. They helped me reword a few things, and told me the name of the road I lived on so I could add that to my address. By the time I copied it in pen to the original, I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing. I decided that I should probably wait until after I spoke with the embassy to submit the paperwork in case they had a faster route. The woman had told me it would probably take about a month to assign a court date for my complaint. I figured there wasn't much difference if I submitted the paperwork on Wed. or on Thursday. No matter what, it looked like I was in for a battle, and probably not a short one.
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