Transition Difficulty #2: Transportation

Although many people say that driving in Harare is bad, so far it doesn’t seem any more difficult than Paraguay.  Of course it is left hand drive and that takes a bit of getting used to.  And the traffic lights are often out.  When they’re not they aren’t very bright so it’s hard to tell if they’re actually functioning at the moment.  But the drivers in general don’t seem too crazy.

What is super difficult is the availability of options when your car hasn’t arrived yet.  I already told the saga of our car rental for the first weekend that we were here.  Since the really old beat up vehicle cost about $70 a day we thought we’d try the taxi route for the second weekend of being here.  The security officer had said that they don’t allow us to use the public system (mini vans that are the local version of a bus system) as they are pretty dangerous (mostly because the drivers are crazy).  They also didn’t want us to use the taxis, but we didn’t feel like we had too many options for getting to church besides walking (which actually was an option to revisit the same church we went to the first week).

Sunday morning we called all 5 taxi numbers that I had gotten from the CLO (the Community Liaison Officer who helps people transition).  No one answered any of them.  So, we decided to change our clothes (to have better shoes for walking) and get out there and try to make it to church for most of the service (there was no way we’d make it on time).  Fortunately the girls didn’t moan and groan since they had seen us make an effort to get a taxi (when we lived in Costa Rica we walked pretty far to church almost every week, which was often a source of complaints).

We got out of our little dead end street (called a close here!) and a car that had just passed us stopped.  It was a Zimbabwean neighbor who asked where we were going.  It turns out he was going to check on one of his businesses close to the church we were going to before he headed out to his church which is 100 k out of the city.  So, not only did we not have to walk, we got to meet a neighbor!  We never met any of our neighbors in Paraguay, unless they were embassy families who lived in our area.

The head of US AID Zimbabwe happens to attend the same church we were visiting and after the service we got to meet her and her husband and daughter (John of course had met her, but not the rest of the family).  They invited us over for lunch after the service and then drove us home!  So that also worked out well and we enjoyed feeling God’s provision for our lives as we so often do.

I think someone went to bat at the embassy for us over transportation difficulties – maybe someone in John's office or our sponsor after they found out what had happened over the weekend – and we’ve since been told that we can use motor pool even on the weekends and off hours until our vehicles arrive.  It seems like they go back and forth on this policy and we happened to arrive at the wrong moment or just got the wrong information since I didn’t think it was an option. 

Not that motor pool is always reliable.  I had a pick-up scheduled for the middle school open house at HIS on Wednesday.  When the driver still hadn’t arrived at the start time I called to find out what was going on.  The answer I got was that they were running late, but no real reason for why, so who knows if they forgot, or if I’m just not very high on the priority list (it is after all a motor pool for work related travel), but I was pretty disappointed to arrive a half hour late to the open house. 

We’ve been told that the vehicles we ordered from Japan have arrived in Durban, South Africa and should be on their way soon.  Of course, who knows what soon means and we probably can’t receive them until our diplomatic papers are in order, so for the time being all we can do is be patient…  We actually bought two cars – a Honda CRV and a Honda Fit - sight unseen, used cars with steering wheels on the right hand side.  It was quite interesting to try to convince the woman at our bank that I really wanted to transfer that much money in a foreign internet transaction!  Check back to see how it all pans out.