The copier was already warm by the time I arrived. Someone had been feeding it forms all morning. I placed a passport on the glass, pressed the green button, and the light ran across it like a tired searchlight. When the paper slid out, half the face was missing. Just white where the photo should be. I tried again. Same thing. Then a grinding sound, like the machine had bitten into the document and couldn’t let go.
Rami, the admin assistant, came over with a screwdriver and the calm of a man who fixes other people’s mistakes daily. He opened the side panel, pulled out a strip of mangled paper, and said, “It happens. Sometimes they take a bite.” He wasn’t talking about the passport. He was talking about the day.
We stood there, waiting for the copier to reset. Students came in with certificates that needed stamping, a teacher dropped off a stack of attendance sheets, and the air smelled faintly of toner and dust.
The passport belonged to a student who’d travelled six hours to be here. Syrian, second year, studying education. She watched the machine like it might confess. “It’s okay,” she said, smiling a little too politely. “It’s not the first time something important disappears.”
HOPES, funded by the EU through the Madad Trust Fund, supports access to higher education and counselling in the region, which is the official way of saying there’s a lot of quiet help behind these desks and corridors.
While we waited, another student told a story about his brother in Beirut who’d once lost all his documents in a bus crash. He said they went to a car accident lawyer because the insurance refused to pay for the hospital bills until they could prove who was driving. Everyone nodded like they knew that kind of story. A photocopy gone wrong is small, but it rhymes with bigger things.
Rami finally coaxed the passport out, intact except for a faint ridge down one page. He dusted it with his sleeve, lined it up again, and this time the copier behaved. The photo came out sharp, the border straight.
The student took the copy, thanked him twice, and slipped it into a folder already swollen with official paper: residency forms, tuition slips, the letter confirming her scholarship. Outside, the corridor hummed with voices from the next counselling session.
I stayed a moment longer, watching the green light pass across the glass again. Every document a small proof that someone exists somewhere, officially enough to move forward.