Who could have orchestrated this event….
By Eddie Chow
This was a holiday trip to Malaysia my daughter Kim and her friend were looking forward to for some time. However, it did not get off to a good start.
The night before they were due to leave, with all their travel things packed ready in the lounge room, an unfortunate incident happened. When they got up in the morning, they found their place was burgled with both their wallets stolen. Thankfully their passports and travel documents were elsewhere so they were still able to leave. I turned up and helped them as best I could with some money and made arrangements to replace their cards to be sent over to them overseas to draw cash from ATM’s.
Sending help
Thinking to myself that 2 days to obtain new cards, another 3 days for post to reach Malaysia, one week or so should see them OK with sufficient cash on them to easily last a week. My logic was Perth is no further to Malaysia than Sydney and I regularly receive mail overnight from Sydney to Perth, so this should be a safe bet.
One week later, they had received nothing; then 12 days, still nothing. They messaged that they just had enough money to pay for another two nights at the backpackers. Things were getting desperate. Knowing quite a few of our friends in our Perth Oikos Fellowship came from Malaysia, I sent out an email to everyone in the mailing list asking how long it takes airmail to get over from Perth to Malacca. The sad response was “We often have our mail to Malaysia lost for good”. What a shock! My son Graham in Sydney actually offered to drop everything and fly over to rescue the situation.
Help arrives
Postscript: the debit card did finally arrive – after over 3 weeks. I took the precaution of sending it in a non-descript brown envelope in a magazine with a slot cut out the size and thickness of the card. But the other card sent directly from the bank never got there.
