It’s all in the passport

This was her dream internship.  She’s worked on her application for over a year, meticulously preparing the necessary papers and complying with all immigration requirements.

She is a 20-year old hardworking student.  Probably one of the most diligent this school has ever seen.  She’s set her sights on doing her internship in Australia and all her efforts the last two years were geared towards that end.

Her parents moved to Holland when she was three.  And this is the only country she’s ever known.  The only country whose traditions and values she’s embraced, whose education system has molded her and whose principles have shaped her into everything that she’s believed in.

Most times however, there exists the unavoidable clash between the parents’ desire to preserve their beliefs and practices back home.   And it creates confusion and friction because The Netherlands has shown her there is equality between men and women and she wants to embrace that.  But her father is borne of the country where the women were brought up to be submissive, because that’s all he’s ever known.

She wonders how will she find her own identity in this clash of cultures?

She decides to go away as far as possible. Far away from the looming presence and influence her family and the country of birth she barely knows have always had over her.

To build a life of her own.  To experience freedom in all its entirety.  To walk the streets without carrying the stigma of her headscarf screaming “I-am-a-Muslim” and all things tied to it.  To feel her hair blowing in the wind, without the push and pull of the outside forces threatening her every choice.

So after a year of phone calls and complying with Australian immigration and student visa requirements, she finally gets approval.  The flight is booked; the ticket is in her hand.  She can’t contain her excitement.

Two weeks before departure she gets a phone call from the immigration and visa department of the Australian embassy in Berlin.

Ooops.  By the way, you have to submit yourself for a lung x-ray examination and your doctor has to send the results from their clinic directly to our Health Center in Sydney.

“We will perform the x-ray but you are responsible for sending the result yourself”, was the Dutch doctor’s reply.

In theory, it takes two weeks of processing and that’s the only time she’ll be given the green light to fly … in practice, it takes a month.

What happens next is a spiral of events the stuff Murphy’s Law is made of.

Doctor refuses to send the x-ray result, she sends it herself.  It gets lost in the mail, she needs to go through another x-ray exam.  Doctor refuses again to send the result straight from the hospital, Australian embassy tells her again it has to be sent directly by the doctor himself to comply with visa policies.

Meanwhile, her school informs her that a month’s delay from the starting date of her internship means she will not be allowed to attend her graduation ceremony.   She will not have completed the number of hours to comply with her internship requirements by then.

And you tell this story to everyone and everybody agrees tsk tsk that can’t be right. But no one lifts a finger to make a phone call or write a letter to set things straight.

It doesn’t matter where you have lived the last twenty years of your life, whether you’ve been trekking the mosquito-infested jungles of Taman Negara or contracted tuberculosis in Indonesia, if you have a Dutch passport you don’t need to submit yourself to any testing for tuberculosis and malaria.

But even if you’ve never left The Netherlands for the last twenty years, you are required to get tested and x-rayed for all kinds of diseases known to man.

Because your passport is Moroccan.