Good Filing Monitor

From a series of photos on officialdom around the world:   Sushma Prasad is an assistant clerk at the Cabinet Secretary of the State of Bihar (population 83 million) in the Old Secretariat in the state capital, Patna, in India.   To see the series http://www.guardian.co.uk/share/1547260

Keeping copies, filing, tabulating, systems, recalling, these are some of the underrated skills of the expat life.  Until I hit working life my family model for safekeeping key documents was that of 'putting them somewhere safe'.  In the top right hand drawer of the sideboard in my parents' living room in general.  5000 miles is rather too far for this to continue as my main filing cabinet, but its still my mental default, now supplanted by 'the desk upstairs', 'the floor next to the desk upstairs' and so on.

In your home country it is fairly clear which documents will be needed again, which are vital. The UK, I now discover, has a fairly forgiving attitude to poor filers, a reasonable computer network, a general ability to provide duplicates should this prove essential.  Sadly, this is a poor model for the rest of life. I once temped in the certification office of an elite London college, providing duplicate certificates for global graduates who'd lost them.  Several years of verifying records from the 1970s had been kept in an underground basement which had flooded, - all records lost.  But that was the exception, rather than the rule (Catrin, PhD, 1972).

I remember my outrage when there was a change of head at our children's UK primary school, and the new head, clearly a superlative filer herself, introduced a new incentive scheme for the children, the Governors' Award.  Children providing five of their merit certificates (issued at irregular intervals on gaining 50 merit stars, around twice a year) would qualify for the Governors' Award, a tea-party 'with chocolate' with the governors, and termly picnics and outings. 'Children of good filers' award' I called it sourly, until we disenterred Firstborn's certificates from archaeological layers around the house.  If only I'd known then....

Shifting the goalposts happens regularly here too. Last year there was a three month period where daily, queues encircled an administration block in town. The government had introduced legislation that no one could take public examinations without first providing a birth certificate - often not issued up country.  Hoardes of pre-KCSE students or their parents queued for days to get a birth certificate, 16 or more years after their birth.  A friend's housekeeper sought to track down  her husband who had left her 17 years previously, had never paid anything towards the upkeep of his children, and whose agreement was needed before her son's birth-certificate could be issued.  In vain. In the end she departed again up country bearing gifts for his mother and for the chief of their area, and returned, weary, several days later with the precious certificate, achieved via a back alley route.  One of the country's most respected and prized religious orphanages and vocational training schemes only takes in orphans who have their birth certificate.  It seems very hard when you'd imagine many of those in need of support, - or who had survived a time on the street - might well be missing this (now) key document.

I'm in a longstanding tussle with Kenyan officialdom. Last week I 'dropped in' to my contact person on the fifth floor of a mighty towerblock with no lift to find out the current status of my application, - filed 8 months ago.  'It's been approved!' Hurrah, fanfares. But turning up next morning with all my paperwork to finalise the documentation, I pass via my contact to his colleague four floors down, who deals with the next stage. 'It should be there by now' says my contact. Ominous words in retrospect, since the computer records show in fact it was approved 5 weeks ago, just I still haven't received the letter.  Down I traipse. Help the colleague search various files, daybooks, piles of paper at random over the office. To no avail. My paperwork is lost. 8 months in the waiting, already onto the second application, and the key bit of paper is lost. 

'Can't you proceed without it as you can see the approval on the database?' I say in wheedlng tone?  Come back tomorrow, I may have found it by then, he says, hoping to defer a thorny problem or put me off.  'Someone is back here for the fifth time,' his colleague says disapprovingly in Kiswahili, thinking I don't understand. Oh dear. In for a long wait them.