The comedy of disasters: delays, dysfunction, and days without showers (Part 1)

It was already 10:30pm on Thursday evening and both my energy and patience were so eroded I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream. Being the emotionally constipated person that I am, however, I did none of the above. I just stared at the back of the seat in front of me with a glazed expression, scrutinizing the oval buttons and ridges in plastic frame of the TV monitor in an attempt to distract myself from all the emotions knotted in my chest. The captain had just come on the intercom to make the announcement. As soon as the words “ladies and gentleman…” crossed his lips in that crackling technology-mediated voice I knew what would follow would be bad news. It all seemed so surrealistic…more like something out of a film than something that was actually happening. Some people refer to it as Murphy’s Law. Who “Murphy” is and why he is associated with (or perhaps causes) series of disasters I cannot say, but one thing is certain, I now believe his law is as certain as the law of gravity: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong—especially when living in Africa.

It had all started back in my village in the Kalahari. I had packed in a hurry the night before, planning to make an emergency trip to the US. My grandfather was in the hospital and it wasn’t certain if he’d make it out again. I simply had to go. So at 7 am I hustled out to the tree that serves and the taxi stand just in time to catch the van as it was passing. I was taken aback when I saw that it was quite empty. Those of you have been following my blog know that a taxi is NEVER empty when it arrives at the stand. I should have realized at that point that Murphy was at work on this excursion of mine. The driver made a u turn and the stand and asked me where I was headed. I told him Vryburg and he waved to me to come inside. I climbed in the back feeling quite suspicious of how horrifyingly empty it was. I felt even more tense when I began driving the opposite direction of where we need to go. I asked him about it. He responded that he needed to pick up more passengers in the next village over. In the next breath he asked my for my phone number and where I lived (in the classical manner of South African males) I told him I wasn’t going to give it to him. He asked me why not, and then he asked me my name. I stifled a chuckle and the ridiculousness of it all. It was always the same sad script they don’t seem to understand that how awkward it would be to call someone whose name you don’t even know. I wasn’t in the mood for the whole spiel so I told him flatly to forget about it because there was no way I would be giving him my number or telling him where I lived. Again in classic fashion he continued to try to persuade me, I simply ignored him. I just needed to get to the capital as quickly as possible which made his advances doubly irritating. As all of this banter was going on we were driving around the village picking people up at their homes. We circled the entire village and even stopped to talk to a few of his friends before we finally got on the road. By then it was a whole hour later than our usual departure time.

After 2 hours of driving we arrived in Vryburg. It was 11am on Tuesday.  “Finally,” I thought. Now it only remained to find a taxi headed to Pretoria. With any luck id be able to be on the road within an hour. Taking the taxi would be much faster than travelling by bus I had decided, and it would be cheaper too—half the price to be exact. But as we say in the US, “you get what you pay for.” In this case what I was paying for was a rusty old trash can on wheels in worse shape even that my usual taxi out of the village. Would this thing even make it out of the lot? I had no time to lose, however, and so I said a quick prayer and got inside. By that point it was half full and I imagined it would be much longer to wait. (Everyone who lives here knows that they no taxi will leave the stand until ever single seat, thing that can function as a seat, and space that can fit even half a butt cheek is filled.) So I just had to wait. As each new passenger came the driver directed them where to sit –shuffling and redirecting them as if it were all some game of human Tetris. 1 hour became 2 and 2 hours became 3 as we just sat there like so many sardines in a can. Finally, after some 3 ½ hours of waiting we finally pulled out of the lot. I grimaced at the thought of driving for 5 hours pressed together like that. One can only sit for so long with ones shoulders at an angle or leaned forward before the strain becomes unbearable. At any rate I was so glad to finally be underway that I no longer cared about how questionable the means by which id be getting there were.

So there we were cruising along. We’d left Vryburg behind some 10 minutes before and were out on the open road when suddenly, Boom! The driver’s side seat dropped a few inches…so did my heart. We’d blown a tire. We cruised to a stop in tall grass by the side of the road and all piled out. The driver pulled out his spare. The spare was not much of a spare, however, being that it was close to bald and had a sizeable gash in its perilously thin tread…and naturally, he didn’t have a jack. After all, this is Africa. Why on earth would a taxi driver ever have need of a jack? I stood there in the tall grass staring at the spare lying on the ground while the driver and a few other passengers tried to flag down a passer-by. Ubuntu (that is, the warm-hearted concerns Africans have for one another) is apparently dead in South Africa. About 20 cars passed us before our salvation came in the form of a young Ethiopian business man. In short order we are on our way again. Each second however I prayed we’d not have another blow out on our sorry excuse for a spare.  That would be adding insult to injury. To my relief, however we stopped at an auto shop about an hour later and got a “real” tire put on. Again we all piled out and sat by the side of the road sipping on cold drink (what they call soda) and chatting a bit for the 30 minutes it took to do the repair and then it was a again time to hit the road. We crammed ourselves in, all feeling a bit more certain we’d survive the commute and eager to get it over with. Murphy, however, had other ideas about how things should continue. When the driver turned the key in the ignition, the only response was that tell-tale coughing of an engine out of power. The battery was all but dead. It took four guys pushing to get us out of the lot and a lot more pushing to get the engine to turn over. Meanwhile our Van was holding up traffic and some motorists were quite angry. Fifteen minutes later, however, we were on our way…headed due east with the setting sun roasting the back of our necks and sweating against one another in a very obnoxious way.

Every hour or so, I’d get a message from my Peace Corps supervisor asking where I was. The Peace Corps had a driver waiting to pick me up so that I wouldn’t have to walk to the hostel with my luggage in the dark, but drivers usually go home around 5pm and each delay meant he had to stay that muck longer past his time to get off work. As we approached Pretoria I called to say we’d be in within the hour. After all that had happened I was glad the end of this part of the journey was in sight….but Murphy always gets the last laugh. At a split in the road, the driver took a wrong turn. The regular passengers among us threw up their arms and hollered “You’re going the wrong way!” and “Wait, you need to turn around.” But the driver, who was a man of limited stature with an attitude to compensate, insisted it was the right way and refused to turn around, ultimately adding an additional 30-40 minutes to our trip.

When I finally did arrive I was worn out and frazzled and felt guilty for making our driver wait so long. He was very displeased but still courteous. I shared my short bread cookies with him in an attempt to ease his frustration about the unpaid overtime. After he dropped my at the Hostel I breathed a sigh of relief. I was at the point of collapsing. “I hate you Murphy!” I thought.