mmmm, lunch- You strap a dead goat carcass to the roof of a car. This isn't because you have accidentally hit a farmer's goat or are clearing the road of road kill. It’s a work mates gift for his wife back home.
- Training for clinicians and nurses in a rural clinic is ended early due to elephants. Everyone walking or biking home needs to be given plenty of time to avoid the section of road that elephants usually cross on their daily trek to the river in the dry season.
- You realize you have multiple options when being pulled over by a police officer (all of which involve arguing extensively):
1) You pay full price for a ticket and get a receipt, which depending on the offense, can easily be $50 on the spot. I believe there is a way to contest a ticket in court, but would require navigating an INTENSE bureaucracy.
2) Talk your way into a warning.
3) Negotiate with the policeman to pay a 'fine' that is a fraction of the ticket. No receipt. The money goes directly into the policeman's pocket. This amount can be 10-25% of the value of the fine, and the policeman is perfectly happy to go home with more money to feed his family or buy himself a beer.
There is a 4th option I haven't tried: not stopping. The police officer's here either have checkpoints where you slow down to talk to them, or are waiting at the top of a hill and wave you over to the shoulder. Note that police officers here very rarely have cars or guns (In fact, if you call after a robbery, usually the first question is whether they were/armed with a gun or not, and the second, only if the answer to the first is in the negative, is to ask for gas money or a ride to pick up the officer and take them to the scene of the crime). What if you just didn’t stop when the officer flagged you down? They are on foot... You have a car...
- The center and shoulder lines on a highway are painted by hand. Using string, rocks and small paint brushes (one size up from Bob Ross). And the highway is still open. Can you imagine painting all the road markings from Boston to Washington D.C. on I-95 by hand?
- You realize that all the fancy T-shirts sporting American slogans have ZERO bearing on the personality of the wearer. I'm talking about Madonna T-shirts on large black men. The next time you design a T-shirt with a clever / risque saying, please picture a 12 year old African boy wearing the shirt - because that's where it will eventually end up.
- You aren't sure what the most dangerous part of driving in Africa is because there are so many options:
1) Goats (or larger animals) bolting across the road at random times
2) Attempting to overtake a slow-moving truck on a two-lane highway and having to stop due to a cow in the other lane.
3) Potholes that will debilitate your car. Seriously, some of the potholes on the main highways span both lanes of the road, are at least 5 ft in width and 2 ft in depth.
4) Trucks that break down all the time and at the worst sections of road - like going uphill around a corner. There is no shoulder, so the truck is stopped in your lane, requiring you to swerve into the lane of oncoming traffic. You know in advance by a few branches cut and placed carefully in the middle of the road. The truck driver is sleeping underneath his vehicle or sitting by a fire on the shoulder.
Oh could this list go on!
No comments:
Post a Comment