Chapter 56\ Ramzi, whose passport is this?

The workload was intensifying by the day in Bahrain. More clients were eager to resume their campaigns around the region, and they did not want their business to suffer because their advertising agency was out of reach due to the civil war in Lebanon.

Eddie and I had opened this floodgate and it had become our challenge to deliver. We stayed in the office until a very late hour every night and forgot about Bahrain’s Friday-Saturday weekend, as clients became very demanding on the last day of their week. We continued making decisions on our own, because every time we needed Beirut’s approval our requests remained with Samir Fares at the Phoenicia, since he wasn’t getting through either Erwin Guerrovich, Raymond Hanna, Nahi Ghorayeb or the Fattals. Both of us had the same concern over the money needed to keep the operation running and to silence the media, whose chasing was getting louder and more frequent than the client’s requests. With this background, my only opportunity to see my family was to combine business travel, the Saturday-Sunday weekend, and my swift personal visits to Abu Dhabi.

Once I went to Qatar to meet the Unilever distributor in Doha. Transit visitors were required to hand in their passports to the Qatar Immigration Authorities on arrival against a receipt that we had to present when leaving the country to collect our passports back. All passports were stored in large wooden drawers but were separated by nationality to speed up retrieval. On my Bahrain-Doha ticket, I had added a Doha-Abu Dhabi extension and then a direct return to Bahrain.

After completing my visit, I drove to Doha Airport two hours before Gulf Air’s BAC-III flight was due to depart, allowing time for my passport to be located and given back to me in time. There were many flights departing around the same time and the queues were long, so passengers were becoming irritated and nervous. I was getting close to the check-in counter, where a very old woman in a traditional Iranian shadour (veil) was already standing in front of the counter. Her very old shabby suitcase would have burst, had it not been for the strings and tapes she had wrapped around it.

The woman had been a domestic help with a Qatari family for around 20 years, we were told later. All the money she had saved had been converted into gold coins, which she had wrapped in the parcel she was holding close to her chest. At the counter, the Gulf Air officer asked for her passport and ticket, both of which she had inserted inside her gown and close to her chest. To be able to pull them out, she placed her precious parcel on the counter and knelt to dip her hand into her inner dress without letting the airline officer see what she was doing. When she stood up to hand her passport to the officer, she realized that the parcel had vanished, so she started screaming. This generated a big commotion in the departure hall as all travelling passengers tried to see what was happening.

The Qatari police stormed into the hall in big numbers and suddenly an announcement was made – on the airport’s PA system – that all departing flights were being delayed until the police had completed a search of every person in the hall. The process was slow and chaotic since it involved a body and luggage search. After a long, agonizing wait, my turn came, and I rushed from the departure hall to the immigration counter. The officer asked my name and nationality, then he handed me a passport saying: “Ramzi and Lebanese? Here you are. Now you need to quickly rush to the plane which is about to depart.”

The short flight was spent with everyone on board commenting about the poor woman and her lost life savings. Before we knew, the plane touched down at Abu Dhabi Airport. I rushed out knowing that my brother-in-law would have been waiting for hours.

When I presented my passport to the Abu Dhabi immigration officer, he flipped through the pages and eyed me with a sharp look, asking for my name. The moment I said Ramzi, he handed the passport back to me saying: “Ramzi, whose passport is this?” He was pointing to the photo which – to the shock of my life – was not mine. The Qatari immigration officer had handed me the passport of another Lebanese man with the name Ramzi Sambar. The Abu Dhabi immigration team refused to accept my explanation of how I landed in the UAE with the wrong passport. They said that unless I had my own passport, they would not allow me into the UAE. They wanted to put me back on the same Gulf Air flight that brought me in. A fact that made me panic even more because the flight was continuing to Bandar Abbas in Iran. I tried bringing them back to their senses by saying: “If Abu Dhabi, the Arab country, is denying me entry, how do you expect the Iranians to treat me?” After a long debate, they gave me Ramzi Sambar’s passport and sent me to their transit lounge, with an ultimatum that I would be detained in the lounge until I got my own passport.

By this time, two groups of people became aware of my predicament. The first was my brother-in-law Nabil, who had been waiting for hours to pick me up and drive me to a brunch at the house of our friend Wajih Barraj, where my wife, her sister and the two children were waiting. Wajih, a Lebanese engineer and the manager of Pauling & Company, the British civil engineering contractors, had been living in Abu Dhabi long enough to have built a circle of high-ranking contacts, including Sheikh Zayed, the Ruler of the UAE. The fact that I had arrived on a Friday did not make it easy for Wajih’s desperate calls to many of his friends.

In parallel, Gulf Air’s Abu Dhabi Airport manager had started contacting his colleagues in Doha to see if my passport could be located. It took time to receive Doha’s response, but I was lucky there was a flight leaving for Doha, so Ramzi Sambar’s passport was sent with its crew on the promise that mine would be sent on the first flight coming to Abu Dhabi after the exchange was completed.

Five hours after the scheduled arrival time, and two hours after landing, Wajih Barraj left his guests and joined Nabil Zakhour, who had been waiting for ages at Abu Dhabi Airport. Wajih mentioned all the names he was trying to reach as he and Nabil met with the general director of Abu Dhabi Airport. The senior Emirati official finally agreed to let me leave in their company after keeping Wajih’s own passport as a guarantee.

My passport was finally hand carried by a Gulf Air chief steward the next day. The airport’s general director called Wajih Barraj and I accompanied him to offer the Gulf Air station manager and the airport’s boss trays of sweets that we had ordered for the occasion. My passport was there on the desk of the senior official, but it was only handed back to me after an immigration policeman escorted me to the arrival lounge, where I had to fill in a landing card that allowed my passport to be stamped.

Many years later, when I returned to Lebanon, I hired a PA who had worked for Ramzi Sambar before. She soon arranged a meeting with my namesake. To my astonishment, the other Ramzi had never noticed the two Abu Dhabi exit stamps – with a two-day difference – stamped in his passport.