I sit for two and a half hours on a salmon-pink bench in front of the counter of the immigration service in Paramaribo. A yellowed A4, hung with four brown pieces of tape: ‘Register here’, with an arrow. A counter framed with dusty light blue curtains, half closed, behind it a lady who takes one look at me and then says: ‘Your phone is your business. Not my business. I need a printed version of your visa.’
I’m calling a friend, a spoken word artist. ‘Hellooooo?’ Her soft voice.
‘Are you still sleeping? You have to help me with something.’ It’s a quarter to 9 in the morning, but she immediately goes to print my visa at the print shop around the corner. If I don’t extend my visa today, I won’t be able to leave the country next week.
In the meantime, I am waiting with four Chinese, five Brazilians and two suspected Cubans. A leaking pipe next to the counter begins to drip on me something that smells suspiciously like sewage.
My girlfriend’s beautiful face with the dreadlocks arrives, two printed documents are handed to me through an open car window by a green lacquered nail. This is ubuntu. We culture. Surinamese will always be there for each other. It is the practical things in life with which you help each other as a matter of course. No ‘No sorry, I don’t have time’ or ‘Why are you just calling me’. There is no individualism here. You live in a natural togetherness.
Just yesterday I drove with my Surinamese friend past all the ATMs in the city. Republic Bank in Torarica: an A4 page with ‘out of order’ on it. The Surinamese Bank on the Van Sommelsdijckstraat: black screen.
‘Money a no dja!’ a man on the street shouted to us when the umpteenth ATM turned out to be empty. There is no more money. “It’s the end of the month, everyone has been paid,” said friend thoughtfully. He called a colleague, who was able to withdraw money in an inimitable, hazy Surinamese way and left the money for us at a Chinese shop on the Johannes Mungrastraat. It goes without saying that Surinamese drive through the city for each other, even though the petrol is almost unaffordable.
It’s not just that heat from the scorching sun. It’s those ubuntu beams of light that I’m sucking in right now. I smile at spoken word friend.
And yet a slight disappointment at the sight of the documents in her hand. Somewhere, secretly, deeply hidden, I hoped that not only the Surinamese cash, but also the Surinamese ink has run out. That she couldn’t print anywhere. That is why my visa is rejected. That I still have to stay longer in this economically grounded, idiosyncratic, coloring outside the rules, breaking me open.
Nina de la Parra lives and works in Suriname this summer.