The Handy Taxi Man

Written August 7th, 2010

Training is over. It is time to disperse and begin the real Peace Corps experience. The class of 80 newly sworn in volunteers was broken down into 11 groups based to region to which they were being posted. Some groups were fortunate enough to get Peace Corps transportation from the hotel lobby to the front doors of their new homes. Other groups, such as mine, were forced to take public transportation to regional hubs, where we were to stay a few days, buy groceries and furnishings for our houses. When the time came to move into our houses, we were shuttled to our villages in a Peace Corps land cruiser.

To put it simply, I hate public transportation. The problem is that the average seat on a public transportation vehicle is designed to economically accommodate the average size person. I am a larger than average American man. To put it simply, I am too big for public transportation, cannot get comfortable and hate it.

In the morass of Peace Corps parlances in which I am too often mired is the term site rat. A site rat is defined as a volunteer who is goes to village and rarely leaves for two years. I have a theory that a site rat becomes a site rat for one of two reasons: a special affinity for village life or a special social ineptitude making traveling to a big city to interact with other Americans a bad idea for all parties involved. I think I may become a site rat, but I am also an exception to my theory. I don’t see myself developing a special affinity for living en brousse, I enjoy electricity and hot water too much. For those of you that know my love for hot tubs, a hot shower has become my new hot tub. And I don’t consider myself socially inept. To put it simply, it will be hate for public transportation that keeps me in village driving me to become a site rat.

The morning of the dispersal, I was intensely envious of those loading their stuff into spacious air conditioned Peace Corps vehicles as I clumsily walked by them with my bike laden with my bags and bulky groceries. They waved at me smiling through shiny Peace Corps glass while I prepared to engage in real life frogger in an effort to cross a busy street to hail a cab going in the proper direction. To make my situation even more depressing, the taxi was going to take me and three unfortunate others with me to the bus station where we would begin a full day on public transportation. My worst nightmare. The four of us were making the journey across Burkina Faso from Ouagadougou, the capital city, to Banfora, the regional capital of the southwest.
I had been in a bad mood ever since I was told I would be taking public transportation a week earlier. That morning was the culmination of several days of dread. I used my frustration to must the necessary assertiveness to hail a cab. I take that back, we were actually walking, pushing our bikes piled with bags, to a roundabout where we know cabs would be waiting. But if I had needed to hail a cab, I would have had more than enough negative energy to do so.
We arrived at the cabby ground to be swarmed by buzzing suitors. I chose a cab whose driver was most avuncular, and told him in a languid voice that we needed a ride to the bus station. I suggested that two cabs were necessary as I was certain loading 4 people, 4 bikes and 4 sets of bags into one car was impossible. He insisted otherwise. I pointed to his jetta sized cab, to all our stuff and then back at the cab and shook my head. He nodded his. Celenia told me to let him try if he thinks he can do it. I conceded.

They started man started stacking the backs in the trunk, and we did our best to fit four people and bags in the remaining available space. I sat shotgun and had the three girls pile helmets, purses, sacks and bugs under, behind and beneath my feet, on my lap and under each armpit. The girls clamored into the back seat with the rest of the stuff as the driver, finished with the bikes, started the ignition and looked at me with a victorious I-told-you-so grin.

We were off. The cab was riding low bottoming out with each little bump. We had not been on the road five minutes when I heard a snap that coincided with a sudden deceleration. My instinctual assessment of the situation began immediately.

The moments between non-emergency and emergency are very interesting to me. It is the immediate moments following an accident or tumble upon which so much depends. So much is determined by the almost instantaneous perception and processing of a potential emergency situation.

For example, I used to snowboard. I was never really that good, nor did I have the courage to attempt anything exceedingly bold. I was the opposite of magnanimous. Even though most of my snowboarding experiences were more tranquil than extreme, I took my fair share of bad falls. I remember one time, approaching the jump, knowing it was a bad idea to begin with, I wondered why I was going so fast. Something went awry, most likely my lack of skill, and immediately after takeoff I know I was going to fall. In the air, I calculated my chance of injury as probable. Hitting the snowpack hard, the chaos of the tumble overwhelmed my ability to sense any injury. After the chaos subsided and my flailing limbs came to rest, I immediately started probing my senses for any sign of injury. It is these pivotal decisive moments that I find so interesting.
I was thinking to myself of all the hassle, time and rehab that would ensue if I had the bad luck of breaking my leg or some other serious injury. If someone would have been able to closely observe me during those moments, they would have been able to see in my eyes, first, the urgency of assessing a potential urgency, and second, the relief of concluding that nothing other than my pride had been injured.

When the snapping sound came from the taxi’s engine, I could see that the affable taxi driver was in midair calculating the probability of injury. He pressed on the accelerator, but the car did not respond. I could see, first, that he was intently assessing the urgency of the situation, and second, unfortunately, no sign of relief indicating to me the situation was indeed no passing matter. His eyes told me this. As a mother can distinguish meaning from her baby’s cries, the driver knew something was seriously wrong with his car.

We sputtered to the side of the road and the driver let out a sigh. I asked him if it was serious. He affirmed my suspicions. I thought to what a terrible day way to start a day that I already knew was going to be terrible.

The driver got out to look under the hood. Over and between helmets and bags, I saw him reach into the hood and pulled out a thin cable that was frayed and snapped at one end. I had not idea about the function of this cable other than that is was probably at the root of our problem. He used a hammer and screw diver to make a fresh cut where the cable had frayed. Cutting a metal cabal without the proper cables is no easy task, and it demanded ten minutes of our driver’s time. He had plenty of time to catch our bus as we left the hotel early just in case something happened. We were wise.

Sweating profusely, he finally cut the cable and began it back into from where it came. I would never predicted to see the cable poke through the dash and come to rest on the driver’s seat. I was even more surprised to see the drive shut the hood and climb back into the car.

“It’s fixed.” He said. “Let’s go.”

I was confused. The chord was now sitting in his lap. He proceded to wrap the cord around the screwdriver and started the ignition. I was now confused and skeptical. He put the car into gear and pulled on the screw driver to give the engine gas! The screwdriver had become the accelerator operated not by his right foot but by his right hand! He pulled into traffic as he juggled shifting and pulling on the gas to maneuver his way through chaotic West African traffic. He was constantly passing the screw driver, which had become the gas pedal, between his left and right hand, while shifting or steering with the other. I was no longer confused but impressed. His ingenuity was one of the only two good things about that entire day spent on public transportation. The second was that the day simply came to an end. I found myself safely fatigued in Banfora hating public transportation more than ever.