I am not sure how this trip started, was it my completely obnoxious 'plan' to get up in an hour or may be it was the complete reslouteness of Sarvo to meet a guy whom he had never met before!!! Mostly it was both but lets not dwell on such minor things when ....
Well so at around 11 in the night finally Sarvo and I decided to leave for Nicosia to meet this guy whom I will not name here but lets call him Mr. X. So I picked up a nice hot cup of Filter coffee and Sarvo took his jacket and both of us left for Nicosia with little or no knowledge on why we are headed there. The sole aim of the trip was to meet Mr. X. However there was a small problem here.. we had never met this guy nor had much idea what he was doing here in Cyprus and most importantly we had little idea of where he stayed in Nicosia. So armed with a hot cup of coffee and a cellphone we went ahead for this rendevouz.
The cellphone came in good use as soon as we reached Nicosia, and Mr. X was kind enough to wait on the road to pick us up. Sadly however due to a small communication gap we thought that Mr. X was going to wait for us on the balcony, so we were driving all the while stairing at all the balconies to see if there was someone waiting.. waiving.. or doing something!!! However we were dissapointed to find not a soul on any of the balconies... thankfully Mr.X called up at the right time and we understood that we had missed the house. So turning back we found Mr. X waiting for us on the road and there we reached our destination... but the journey was yet to begin!!!
A little know Chinese proverb goes something like this.."Don't be over self-confident with your first impressions of people.” But at that time I was committing the crime of typecasting Mr. X as one of the hundreds of illegals or just legals who have managed to reach the shores of Cyprus but are currently in lowly jobs living everyday in fear of the immigrations or the police or just the white guy on the street. I should say that I was not much off the target here yet I should be chastised for such a narrow mindset... especially for someone whom I have never met before. So to give you a little background on Mr. X, he is a male nurse working in a hospital who has completed his studies in Banglore. He is working for the past 9 years of which the last 2 he has spent in Cyprus. Finally he is the first guy whom I know in Cyprus who actually owns a Pajero!!!
Mr. X with his hospitality had won my heart the minute we stepped into his apartment. It was no less than what you can expect while visiting a good freind back in India and still there was a sense of warmth that seems to be amiss today in India especially Mumbai. Well so Mr. X and his freind and Sarvo and I sat down to chat finally with cans of beer in our hands and plates full of wafers and dry fruits. We started as would anyone living outside India with our affiliations back home and the different parts of India we belong to and so on. Once the ice was broken the converstion veered to the inevitable plight of the immigrants from the different countries here in Cyprus and how they have managed to ruin a part of Cyprus that will never be experienced by someone who visits Cyprus today!!!
Amongst the few things that we touched base during the short rendevouz, I was happy to know that Indians according to him were well respected in and around Cyprus... so much so that even Pakistanis hide behind Indian identities in order to land some job. What surprised me though was the plight of the health system in Cyprus, Mr. X being a part of the health system had an insider view of how the system worked... and believe me it was not something that I would have wished to hear. According to him there were only 5 specialist doctors in the whole of Cyprus who were the guardians of the publicheaalth care system. This meant that there is just 1 heart specialst in the hwol of Cyprus who performs all the operations and so on. Currently according to him this sole Heart surgeon has gone on a one man strike and this resulted in much chaos, since the hospitals already have a witing list of patients who wish to perform their operation for the next 6 months, so this one man strike makes things worse with patients whose days have come to be operated are loosing out to newer patients and I guess you can understand the situation. Also as per him and I would like to attest it first hand(which I will in some time to come) the general hospitals here are similar to what you will find in India. The patients here are dying on tables outside and there are more patients with not enough beds. A doctor in Nicosia who was asked to perform his suties in the Limassol Genral Hospital left his job just 3 days after he joined the hospital as he could not stand the filth in the hospital. Add to this according to Mr. X the doctors here are not much knowledgable with their first priority on making money. Also any case that gets serious means that the patient is air lifted to Israel where in he can find the proper care and knowledge required to treat him. This in itself is a testimony to how bad the system is. I coud not have had imagined that a European country could have such a bad system in place not to mention a complete lack of doctors. Imagine this a population of more than 7 Lakh (not counting the loads of illegals ) and just 5 specialist doctors!!!
This was not all apparently and according Mr. X( I have not verified it ), the tax system when it was formed in the 1970's the people in Cyprus had little idea how to go about it. So a group of professors from Cyprus came to India to learn and understand how the tax system works. So the resultant tax system is what we find as today. The problem however is that there are many loopholes in the system. This means that an Expat can work in Cyprus only under 3 types of visas- 1. IT 2. House Maid 3. Farm workers. As a result of such an inequipped system, Mr.X works in Cyprus under the visas for house maids(who work in hospitals). Now for one of the freinds of Mr. X who has come under the house maid visa to work as a nurse in the hospitals... the social insurance system is inequipped to qualify hin in any of the available categories, so currently he is without any social insurance.
These things are quite complicated and I am not sure whether I understand it correctly or even if I have the right aptitude to comprehed the situation. Still these are eye openers into the world I could not even imagine existed a few months back. I am not sure whether I am happy or sad or even bewildered to see and hear these things but surely I am gratefull that I am witness to such things that are happening in the world. There are many other things that we discussed in the short rendezvous and in Part2 I will try to bring as much as I remember and as accurately as possible.... untill then have a nice day!!!
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