When you enter Syria, you get a fifteen day stay. After that, if you want to remain you have to go to a passport office and get a residency permit. There are a number of these offices scattered throughout the neighborhoods of Damascus and in other major cities. The information I received from the University indicated that I should get a letter from them (a task that would require the tenth passport-sized photo that I have given out this summer). I would also need a copy of my lease or a letter from the hostel I was staying at–something that most landlords are loath to produce because they are trying to evade taxes. I was to take these to the office in the Baramkeh neighborhood, along with 500 pounds (about $11, but enough to buy dinner for two at a very fancy restaurant), fill out a number of forms, and expect it to take a long time. The word among the students was that under no circumstances should I do any of this.
Instead, I was told, I should go to the office in Marjeh Square and pretend that I didn’t speak any Arabic at all. No paperwork would be needed and it would cost next to nothing. It would still take a long time.
My roommate Cameron got a map of the building from a classmate who had been the previous month and set out on Thursday to attempt to get his residency. He came back saying that the map had been absolutely necessary in order to navigate the bureaucracy, and he passed it on to me with a number of further annotations. On Monday I took a photocopy of my passport and the map and set out.
I found the office with only a minimum of wandering and went in, only to see that the inside looked nothing like my map. I stood bewildered until a soldier (all government buildings are staff exclusively by people in military uniforms, it seems) who used what were probably both words of English that he knew to greet me and ask me what I wanted. “Residency,” I said in Arabic. Confirming my suspicion that he didn’t speak any other English, he lead me outside without a word, and pointed to another Passport office with an identical sign a short ways down the street. Who knows what the first office does.
This time, the interior matched. I went to the first window on my map and purchased the requisite form for 15 pounds (about 25 cents, it buys a 1.5 liter bottle of water or a french fry sandwich–a food that is much better tasting in theory than in fact). I sat on the stairs and stared at the most singular form I’ve ever seen. The first few questions were expected: name, parents’ names (presumably used to determine if I might be a former Syrian citizen and thus subject to military service), birthplace and birthdate, occupation, nationality. Then there was a large unlined area that filled three-quarters of the page. It was labeled simply, “Your desire:”. What was I allowed to ask for? Why so much space? Did I need to write an essay explaining my desire? Ifilled the whole thing out writing only “two month residency” in the “desire” section–questions and answers in Arabic only.
This last point was important. I had spent a good deal of extra time at the border because the entry card was bilingual and I had stupidly chosen to fill it out in English. When I got to the window, it turned out that none of the soldiers (again, all government buildings are staffed with soldiers) could read English. One of them began copying out my name in enormous block capital letters starting with the S in Hopkins and then working from right to left through all three names. However, he abandoned this method when neither he nor the soldier next to him knew all the sounds that the letters made and so he could not enter the name into the computer using his Arabic keyboard. He then resorted to asking me all the questions on the form orally in Arabic and then transcribing my answers. I was not going to wait again while a soldier tried to figure out how to spell Robert (not enough vowels for the number of consonants) and Massachusetts (it’s hard even in English) using the Arabic alphabet.
My form filled out, I went to the first room indicated on my map and was confronted with a cramped office with tables set out in a horseshoe pattern, ringed with a dozen soldiers. One was sorting forms and another was putting stamps on forms for a line of people, but all the rest were idle, leaning back in their chairs, playing with their cell phones, chatting and/or smoking. Over a quarter of the workforce in Syria is in the government sector. I can see why.
The man giving stamps pointed me into the next room, where another man sat at a computer. Behind him were bookshelves floor-to-ceiling with bags full of filled-out forms identical to mine sitting askew on the shelves, with no apparent organizing principle. He took my form, read it quickly and immediately made several annotations and stamped it. The computer was apparently a prop, and not actually in use.
I returned to the first room where the first soldier took my form and proceded to staple everything together and then, on the back of the form, he wrote a paragraph in Arabic. His handwriting was inscrutable–some kind of cursive script that I don’t know–but everything he wrote seemed to be copied from the front of the form or from my passport. With several more stamps and a signature he sent my upstairs to a room marked “General Director.”
This man was clearly important, since his office had air conditioning. He appeared to be having a meeting with two other men who stood in front of his desk, but there was another residency-seeker leaving his office as I came down the hall, and he motioned me in when I came to the door. As he read the paragraph on the back of my form, he complained in Arabic about the air conditioning to the other two men, saying it was far too cold. He started to sign my form, but paused in the middle to fiddle with the air conditioner’s remote control. He finished signing my form and then handed it back to me without looking up. As I left, a man in the hall stopped me and took my form into the room next door, which appeared to be a conference room with a meeting going on. After a delay insufficient to even read the short paragraph on the back of the form, he returned, my form bearing another signature.
Back to the first office then, I received several more stamps, including one in my passport, finally. The soldier then sent me down the hall with the word, “General,” in English. The office I ended up in did indeed belong to a soldier with a very gaudy rank insignia. He too seemed to be conducting a meeting with two or three other men, but a soldier waved me in, put a second stamp into my passport and then held it out for the General. He signed the stamp without looking. The soldier then looked up at me and said in English, “Finished.” He mimed closing a book with his hands and then brushed his palms together.
And just like that, I’m allowed to stay in Syria for two months. At no time was I ever looked up on the computer or in any file, I provided no proof that I was doing anything useful in Syria or that I was even living anywhere, and I don’t think that anyone except the man in the first office even really read my form. The only record that the government has is the form that I left them with, which presumably has been relegated to a bag in the office with the computer.
Later in the day, I was visiting a classmate at a hostel in the Old City. I was telling the proprietor about my experience in the office that afternoon and showed him my map. He laughed until he cried. “It is so true”, he said. “It is so true.”
“I will have to send my guests to this office from now on,” he mused, looking at the address of the office. “It sounds much better than all the others.”
Categories: Middle East, Summer 2008, Uncategorized
2 Comments »
