Lost in Libya's Turmoil: Workers from the Third World

By Abigail Hauslohner / Benghazi Sunday, Feb. 27, 2011

TIME MAGAZINE

Foreign workers wait in queues in Benghazi, Libya, on Saturday, Feb. 26, hoping to evacuate the country.

Grammar- Tenses

Aziz has no passport, no money and a lot of anxiety. He spent months making his way illegally northeast from West Africa, bypassing other conflicts, to get away from his own war-torn nation of Liberia and find something better in oil-rich Libya. "I was looking for survival," he says of the long desert journey from Sudan. For a year, he found it, earning a meager wage as a car washer in the town of Kish. Now, waiting in line at Shehada Jazeera School in the Libyan port city of Benghazi, he's running for his life all over again.

The Libyan revolution 1. ___________( just enter) only its second week of turmoil. But tens of thousands of expatriates 2. __________( already flee) the country — spilling over the Egyptian and Tunisian borders, out of Tripoli on chartered evacuation flights and into the port at Benghazi, Libya's second largest city, which is now under rebel control.

In late February, foreign embassies 3. __________(scramble) to evacuate their nationals as fighting rocked the capital and other cities along the country's coast. On Feb. 25, a U.S.-chartered ferry 4. _________(evacuate) more than 300 people, including 167 Americans, from Tripoli to Malta. British military aircraft evacuated 150 oil workers from the Libyan desert on Feb. 26, and the embassy 5. ______(charter) other aircraft from the capital. China says it has so far evacuated 12,000 Chinese workers out of some 33,000 believed to be working in the country.

On Saturday, Feb. 26, in Benghazi, a lone British diplomat 6. ________(scan) the lines of Chinese and Bangladeshi workers who  7. __________( queue) in a cold Mediterranean drizzle, amid the overpowering stench of raw sewage, to board two Greek cruise ships that  8. __________(dock) overnight to evacuate more people. Sent by the British embassy in Tripoli, the diplomat said he  9. __________(scour) the city for British citizens who still needed help. Finding none at the port, he got back into his car and drove off. Later, the ships departed, carrying only the Chinese workers; the hundreds of Bangladeshis who 10. ________(wait) for hours were left behind, many of them in tears.

Indeed, for those holding passports from the developing world, the situation is increasingly grim. Thousands of workers from South Asia and West Africa are stranded here, many without passports or any cash and with nowhere else to go. Crowding the floors of buildings inside the port are Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, Thais and Filipinos. Most, like the Bangladeshis, 11. _________(abandon) by their construction companies. Their Turkish and Chinese managers have escaped without them, and their home countries are too poor, unorganized or anarchic to lend a hand. "We spoke to the Turkish consulate, and they said they would only take the Turkish people," says Idris Shebany, 42, a Libyan businessman turned volunteer who has set up camp at the port to help the foreign refugees, with a sigh. "The others 12. ________(be) no ambassadors, no consuls," says another volunteer, Hayan Salaama, as he shakes his head.

In the absence of a functioning government or international aid organizations, it is Libyan volunteers like Shebany and Salaama — many of them businessmen and doctors in the opposition-held port city — who  13. _________(take) on the difficult task of helping the foreign workers who have been left behind make their escape from chaos. They 14. __________(set) up a makeshift clinic and gathered blankets and mattresses, and they are churning out three meals a day for the foreign workers crowding abandoned offices and storage rooms. One man who normally sells women's clothes  15. __________(pick) up an AK-47 to guard the camp.

Shebany says that roughly 5,000 to 6,000 new foreigners have been arriving every day, many of them packed into buses or trucks. Most so far — Chinese, Turks, Americans and Europeans — have gotten out, the Chinese abandoning an entire battery of cars and trucks in their wake. A muddy field at one end of the port, where people making a quick exit had recently been camped, is scattered with shoes and discarded clothing.

On Saturday morning, 800 Filipinos and 400 Indians arrived from the desert towns of Jalu and al-Kufrah, Shebany says. But it's impossible to get an exact head count. "After an hour, it could be 2,000 to 3,000. We don't have a list, and at any minute, more buses could arrive." He tried asking the Egyptians if they could take any of the foreign nationals over the border. Their response was no.

VOCABULARY

Find the correct word from the passage for each of the following meanings given below.

1.  looking or sounding very serious.     ________________

 2. situation in which groups of people or organizations are involves in serious disagreements ot arguments.     __________________

3. an attempt, by a large number of people, to change the government of a country, especially by violent actions.   ______________

4.  a state of great anxiety or confusion.     ____________

5.  a person who fights against the government of the country.    __________

6. to move people from a place of danger to a safe place.   ____________

7.  a person whose job is to represent his or her country in a foreign country. _____________

8.  to leave somebody in a place from which they have no way of leaving.   _____________

9.  a situation in a country or organization in which there is no government, order or control.      ______________

10. the building where a consul works. A consul is  a government official who is the representative of his country in a foreign city.     _____________

ANSWERS-Grammar- 1. has just entered    2. has already fled   3. scrambled     4. evacuated

5. chartered   6. scanned   7. were queuing   8. had docked   9. was scouring

10. had waited    11. have been abandoned   12. have   13. have taken

14. have set   15. has picked

Vocabulary- 1. grim   2. conflicts   3. revolution   4. turmoil   5. rebel   6. evacuated    7. diplomat    8. stranded   9. anarchic   10.consulate