It took me a little while to navigate the building being remodeled in downtown Santo Domingo. I had been in three different offices waiting for three different people – all who only turned out to be the wrong person and sent me walking down some other hallway. At one point, I actually ended up the computer store-room – which brought me to thoughts of easily I could just make off with some.
After all that’s why I was there: In my hands, I had two plastic bags – basically like striped, elongated sandwich bags – carrying requests for the primary and vocational schools in my community. The shopping list: computers, a generator and a projector.
The secretary I finally ended up in front of looked at me and then at the papers. “This name cannot be on the form,” she said. “Do you think the school could scan another copy of the changed form to us today?”
Immediate thoughts: Just where does this woman think I come from? Scanning? Are we being serious?
What came out of my mouth was simply, “No.” Then there was a pause. And then came, “We don’t even have electricity half the time, and I imagine that scanning an image, finding it saved on the computer, and then attaching it to a document is beyond most people involved in this process.”
The woman looked at me. “This name cannot be on the form.”
“Do you have any white out?” I said jokingly but also – not jokingly. It takes over two and half hours to get from Cayetano Germosen to the capital. I had been in the building for about an hour at this point. I was tired, and I was not about to give up with a little pushing involved.
She laughed. “No.”
The problem was that every request for materials requires not only a signature but a seal to be approved. Red tape.
And I had seen the projectors and computers housed in the back room, but what choice did I have? I got the contact information from everyone in the office (thank you journalism techniques), thanked the woman, and walked out.
This past week and month after my first visit, I walked back into the office with the required changes made to the documents.
One out of the three was still not up to submission standards. (That’s a win right?)
The same girl made copies and stamped the papers with her seal. I told her we would be in touch.
With my service down to less than five months, these are the things I am willing to do. I can pester people. I can hold my own in conversations with people, often whose little amount of power has made them speak with an air of superiority and rudeness. I have the time to sit on buses and wait in offices and struggle with this broken system.
So that’s my work update: Fighting the long defeat still.
