i’m legal! (and I have been for 13 years)

I believe the purpose of the Foreign Registration Office (FRO) is to attempt to break foreigners. Today, finally, after many hours of waiting and watching and listening and glaring and sighing and staring at the ceiling, I got my Residential Permit. Weeee!

This had been my third visit, and I had decided that if I was still unable to get my permit after today, I would just head to Bangladesh or Nepal in a few months, which I may do anyway, so that I can discontinue this process. There appeared to be absolutely no reason for the process to have taken three separate visits, except that the FRO workers can tell me to do anything and I will just have to do it. Today’s visit involved sitting at the FRO desk for two hours, watching the worker write out three additional copies of documents I already gave him multiple copies of, in the slowest manner that I have ever witnessed. It was like the slow-mo version of watching a flower germinate and blossom over four seasons. Except that in the end I was not given a flower but a crappy booklet with a crappy picture of me stapled to it. Copiers don’t appear to be happening here so much in government offices, but that is no excuse for the length of time it took him to fill out these papers. I really could have done the entire episode in 10 minutes myself. I think this process is really just a form of power assertion on the part of the people doing the work. Although, my colleague said it was the result of years of working under a communist government. Dude would fill in a few letters, look around the office, fill in a few more, ask me whether the paper I had just signed was my real signature, walk into the back of the office, double check to make sure that he filled in the correct letters, ask for my passport again, fill in a few more letters, and on and on and on.

The highlight of the visit occurred when his boss came over and started yelling at him. Dude yelled back and they got into a huge screaming match which moved into the back room and continued for at least 15 to 20 minutes. I was later told that the argument was over supposedly faulty information that the worker had given his boss. Apparently, other workers were saying that it was very embarrassing that the two were behaving like children around a foreigner. In the midst of the fight, however, I was able to go into my paperwork on the dude’s desk and cross out the credit card numbers on the copy they had required. No one seemed to notice or care that I was doing this, which was just fine with me.

When I first arrived at the FRO, the Fulbright scholar, with whom I had briefly spoken during my second visit, was sitting at the desk for her third or fourth attempt. The AIF Fellows have been emailing each other about our varying and largely unpleasant experiences at the FROs around the country (one person was asked for a bribe in order to process the paperwork, another was going to be investigated at work before being able to apply, another was charged a late fee- even though she wasn’t late). I had mentioned meeting the Fulbright scholar who was having problems as well, and a Fellow followed up saying she knew of this woman. So, today I told Debjani the Fulbrighter that I knew her through six degrees of separation (she was in a book club, in Chicago, with a woman whose babysitter is a Fellow- ha!). We exchanged contact info. I’m telling you- things just happen here! It’s really amazing. One other thing that just happened here occurred during the ride back to the office, in my boss’s car. A truck rammed us twice- from the front. We kept on driving.