Vignette 2

A vignette I am deleting from a paper 

In August of 2009 I was doing one of the first observations of how a Toba man in his 60 moved around the peripheries of Buenos Aires city. He had migrated there 15 years before from a rural community situated in the Chaco region. As we took the train to the administrative centre for the neighbourhood he lives in we talked about the errand he had to run in the county centre: he had to obtain a temporary work permit by registering as tax payer. It was then that we reviewed the papers he had brought: a state granted employee number, and copy of his national id. When I asked if he had brought the original one he explained that his id had been stolen two months ago. This was a very bad news as the state ids are taking a very long time to get renewed after a loss, during that time one is unable to vote, benefit from a state program or cash a check in a bank.

 

He looked very worried as he would not be able to get paid for the work as a toba language teacher in course he would begin teaching at the university.  As we walked through the streets once we had gotten off the train he started to pint me how he recognized where to go, he remembered a particular tree of the sidewalk, a house, and that would let him know where to turn. He mentioned how many times he had gotten lost when he just came, he had problems understanding how to read an address, he would lose the written piece of paper where he had an address or just did not think he needed to write the address down, but then he found he could not remember a house number. After he conducted me to the state office we asked about the requirements to get registered. The original id was one of them. The problem was that he needed a paper from the chaco province, where he was born, in order to start the request for a new id.

 

As we went back disappointed and thinking what to do I suggested contacting the Chaco government office in Buenos Aires, while he had a different idea, he would send money to a relative back in the Chaco and ask him to look for the paper.  A month latter and after the failed attempts of his relative to get the paper he was planning a trip to the Chaco to get the paper by himself.