The Burden of being a Black African
On 1st Aug 2008, we were in party of 4 (2 Ugandans and 2 Egyptians) travelling to Bali on Valuair. The manager on duty at the check-in counters barred the Egyptians from checking in because ‘they did not have a visa to Indonesia’. Despite repeated attempts to explain that Egyptians could obtain a visa on arrival Indonesia, the manager could not let them check in. Even when we managed to log on to the Indonesian Embassy website (thanks to good internet connectivity in Changi Airport) and showed her that Egyptians could get a visa on arrival, she did not let us check-in. After 30 minutes of embarrassment and repeatedly taunting us with ‘go and get visa first’, she came back and merely said you can check-in. There was no apology of any sort, not even an attempt to explain that there had been a misunderstanding. On the 3rd of August 2008, we were scheduled to fly out of Bali back to Singapore and little did we know that we had another episode of embarrassment by Valuair waiting for u...