I’ve been here many times, from time ranging to 15 minutes to an hour. So when I was going to renew my passport and ID at the same day, I was ready for at least two hours. Luckily things went smooth… ish at Suriname’s favorite place : the CBB – Centrale Bureau voor Burgerzaken
Let me say save you some time and tips if you want to renew your passport.
- Wear a different color shirt when you make new passport photograph. It may be a compliment when people say you haven’t aged one bit, but when you look the same and wear the same color T-shirt, there’s a chance they will send your photo back to be made because the wouldn’t be sure if was recent or not. Trust me on this.
- Make a copy of your ID. You won’t win a lot of time, but things can happen like their copy machine is broken, no toner, or you (or they) just don’t have change (yes you have to pay a tiny fee for a copy)
- Know your height and weight
- Fill their passport renewal form which you can download from their site so you won’t have to do it there and bring your old passport.
For the 5th and final tip, wait till the end… or don’t … just scroll down. I’m not your boss.
For their new E-ID the following
- Just your old ID
The whole process took about 45 minutes and we were with 2 persons. So it went very quick in my opinion and the service wasn’t bad at all. I mean there is room for improvement but the person helping us was very friendly. The only reasons that it didn’t go faster were:
- Only 1 person was helping me at the time. The rest was standing around apparently doing something very important. I think some of them would have a very bright future in being a mime
- The computers had some network issues while trying to log in. A plus side was that the computers seem to have very flexible profiles , but they had to wait for an it person to fix whatever was wrong
- When filling in my details it seemed I was registered in a whole other district and started asking me when did I move
After these hiccups it was not all that bad. I had to wait for my turn to make an electronic ID. The process was simple: take a number by the guard, wait for your number , check details again, make photo, scan fingerprints , write your signature and done. Oh , in case you don’t write your signature a lot, do a few practice runs at home. Makes it less awkward when you don’t know how to write your own signature.
And now all we had to to is wait 4-6 weeks….which if you wanted to travel in 6 weeks would be very concerning.
After calling some connections (and by this I mean we called a guy who knows a guy to know what the status is of passport renewals). It seems that they were out of material to renew passports! And they only have business passports available ! And here’s the kicker: the business passports are made from the same material and the only difference is, they have more paper for your travel stamps! And their excuse is… sorry we’re out of material. They couldn’t tell us this in the beginning? We wouldn’t have wasted so much time waiting.
Which brings me to my 5th and final tip ( for those of you who scrolled down and skipped the middle ….sup?)
5. Get a business passport. There literally is no difference except for the few extra pages and the expiration date is also 5 years. It’s 200 SRD extra but it can be done in less than 5 day, yes 5 days.
So there you have it. It wasn’t all that bad, but if you’re in time squeeze you might get easily irritated.
If I had to give out a few more tips then these would be it:
- Renew your passport in time even if you’re not planning to go anywhere. You can not travel within 6 months of the expiry date of your passport
- If you’re in a hurry go for the business passport
- Don’t try to pay someone to get it done fast. Believe me I was tempted to do this but when I got the right information, I just paid extra for a business passport and this is less than what people asked of me to get a regular passport done. We only would be contributing to a flawed system. (Even now it looks I’m contributing to it because I bought a business passport )
- And finally : Don’t be discouraged by some rude civil servant over the phone or anywhere else, there may be a lot of them, but there are also those who are genuinely very nice and willing to help you
If you can do this, you can do everything !
Not really, but it’s nice to be prepared.
