By Chris Morvan
There is a character trait I’ve noticed in other parts of the Caribbean that I was dismayed to find exists here: the official’s need to be obeyed. By “official” I mean anyone in any walk of life who is in charge of something. I came across this last week in a surprising setting.
It’s ten to seven in the morning at the Government Building in Philipsburg. I’m here not to attend an appointment, but to make one. With the Census people, to be precise.
Do it on the phone, you say? Sure, I tried that, but the phone doesn’t get answered, except by an automatic device that invites you to leave your details, presumably thinking you’re naïve enough to believe somebody will call you back. I phoned till I was blue in the face and got nowhere.
So, I went down there. Early. People in this island start early and finish early, I’ve noticed. Maybe they open at seven.
The good thing about getting here at the crack of dawn is that you can actually get in the car park and position your vehicle somewhere convenient in case it’s raining when you come out.
At 6:50 there are already about 20 people here, and most of them look like locals, not clueless new arrivals such as myself. They are here for a variety of reasons, but mainly to make appointments. Nobody knows what time the building opens, but staff keep arriving and eventually one of my queue buddies gleans the information that it opens at 8:30.
Well, at least we know now. We’re in an orderly queue along the wall at right angles to the door. More people trickle through the gate, so I am now a veteran with a certain status: someone who knows what time they open.
But then an expert arrives. She’s a middle-aged woman with braided hair (I’m not fluent in hair terminology but it’s something like that) in jeans and a red t-shirt. She may be just a member of the public like the rest of us, but she has done this before, as she keeps telling anyone who will listen. We will have to form separate queues, she says. On the other side of the main doors. For Census stand here. For Labour there. For blah blah blah next to them. That’s how they did it last week. She knows these things.
Most of us do as she suggests. After all, we’ve got nothing on the agenda for an hour and a half, so it passes the time. We form more orderly queues and make small talk with strangers as we prepare for the long wait.
But then the doors open. No, it’s not an unexpectedly early start, it’s a cleaner. A neat and tidy young woman with a broom, a yellow bucket on wheels and a wooden-handled mop.
It’s written all over her disgruntled face: I am in charge here, and we’re in the way, preventing her from sweeping the porch area and wiping it with her state-of-the-art bucket-squeezed mop.
“Move away, off the area,” she commands. “Down the steps there – yes. Come on.”
Obviously she has a job to do and we don’t want to stop her, but it’s unusual when, as I am, you’re from a country famous for its excessive politeness, to be bossed about quite so boldly. If she’s like this at work, what must she be like at home?
Perhaps this woman’s real role is preparing the public for what awaits inside, where we’re issued with numbered tickets and wait like good boys and girls for our number to be called before we can go to the counter and be walk to go to the far end, round the corner, and wait there to be attended to. Maybe they do have a system here, but it all seems a bit haphazard.
I knock on a door, enter and am glared at by the occupants of the little room. “Sit outside and my colleague will attend to you,” the staff member says as her clients, who I didn’t see waiting outside at daybreak but who look suitably traumatized anyway, silently urge me to leave them and their precious appointment alone. She doesn’t ask for my name.
Lonely and dispirited, I sit in the only available place, at the back. But then, in something like a small miracle, I am plucked from my anonymous obscurity by a tall, shapely woman who it must be said makes her uniform look great. And she’s polite, friendly and efficient. She’s even open to negotiation about the appointment, when I had expected to be given something, take-it-or-leave-it.
Funnily enough, the woman we dealt with last week at Immigration looked similar and behaved in a similar way. So you see, the world doesn’t end, civilization doesn’t crumble if you’re nice to people.
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A newcomer’s view of St Maarten/St Martin – by Chris Morvan
