scribes

In general, my neighbourhood is slow to wake up in the mornings.   The streets are still sleepy at 8:30am when I am walking up the hill to the office -  I'll see maybe a shop owner or two sweeping the sidewalk or hauling deliveries and a few guys standing around and smoking in the morning sunshine in front of the autobody shop at the corner.  (This appears to be the favourite neighbourhood hangout for men aged 45 - 60).

 Stillness prevails, at least until I get to King Abdullah square where I hit  'Embassy Row'.  A number of high-profile embassies and consulates - Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey - all of which generate a lot of visa applicants in this part of the world - and an array of Jordanian government institutions are all located here.  In one block you find the passport office, the Civic Registry, The Prime Minister's communications office, the Department of Statistics,  the excellently named Museum of Political Life (which unfortunately is never open when I want to go in, so I am still in the dark as to its collection),  and a host of many other institutions (some of them with inexplicable functions... see above).

Here the sidewalk tempo changes.  It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but it finally dawned on me that these people milling around are waiting for offices to open or appointments and trying to get their paperwork in order.  They are from all walks of life.  Young guys in jeans and aviator sunglasses and Guess knock-off T-shirts, black-clad women in face veils, men from the Gulf in spotless white kaftans and kefiyehs - these guys (always guys) are usually milling around the well-guarded entrance to the Saudi embassy -  old bedouin couples, the women in traditional embroidered gowns, with tatooed faces, the men in red-checked headscarves with incredible sun-weathered skin.

A makeshift cottage industry has sprung up in response to the plethora of official buildings. Again it took me a long time to figure out who the guys were sitting at card tables on the sidewalks under folding patio umbrellas.  Were they selling lottery tickets?  Signing up people for cell phone service?  They are there every morning.   At some point in the middle of the afternoon, they fold up their tables and chairs and depart,  leaving their mobile offices propped up against a nearby wall overnight.  Some even have built more solid-looking stalls that look like part of a farmer's market and have, predictably, taken over the sidewalk.

I finally asked a taxi driver what these people had on offer, and he informed me that they were scribes.  And fixers.  I can't believe it didn't occur to me sooner.  For a fee they fill in the forms of illiterate people.  Or draft documents.  Or they accompany foreign workers or rural peasants around the maze of government offices and sort out their paperwork. Now that I know what I am seeing, I get it.    I just noticed yesterday that on one of the side streets, one entrepreneurial fellow has set up a little photo booth in case you need visa pictures.  I have no idea how much they charge.  There are so many of them, each one cannot possibly get that much business.

I do know that as a foreign worker myself, you can't get through the paperwork without a little bit of professional help.  It is a sad truth that the nature of my stay here and my country of origin mean that I get a little more support than the folks who need the assistance of sidewalk scribes.  But that is another post for another day.


I want to take more pictures of the different government offices and embassies - particularly the Iraqi embassy which is a lovely miniature reproduction of the Babylon Gate.  But they are all heavily guarded by young men in camo holding semi-automatic weapons.  And I am afraid that I appear highly suspect snapping photos of banal government buildings and embassies - who knows what I could be planning!

I also want to get more close ups of the scribes at work with their clients, but that too, is a bit too intrusive.  So for now I am taking pictures during off hours and might work up the nerve to take some crowd shots in the coming weeks.