The ward keeps the register of households in these forty one streets, and most of the letters people want are drawn straight out of it.
What the desk issues: a letter confirming your address, a letter confirming who lives at a household, a certified copy of a ward register entry, and a letter of introduction for an application elsewhere.
Bring your identity document. A letter for somebody else needs a signed note from them, kept with the request. Twenty rufiyaa, thirty for a certified copy, nothing where a school, the health centre or a court has asked for it.
This is stream one at the desk and it moves in about ten minutes even at nine in the morning. A remarkable number of people queue in stream four for an hour to ask for a letter.
It is also the Saturday desk's main business, nine until noon, for people who cannot come on a working day.
What the ward cannot do: issue or replace a national identity document, a passport, a birth or marriage record, or anything else held by a national registry. People are sent here for all of those every week. The desk will give you the right office, its hours and what to take, which is genuinely faster than being sent from building to building.