COMBI-NATION
We are
certainly used to it by now, but surviving without a car (or cars) has been a
challenge. Owning or driving a car in Peace Corps is a firing offense around
the world. That was certainly not the case in the early years of the program. When
Stephanie served in the Peace Corps in Kenya in the 1970’s, she tooled around
in her 1968 Ford Corsair GT. When our Botswana Peace Corps Country Director was
a volunteer in Cameroon in the 1980’s, he drove a motorcycle. But
unfortunately, the road accident death toll of Peace Corps volunteers mounted
over the years (the single largest cause of death), and the decision was made
to ban car ownership and driving. Another reason for the change: the
expectation that volunteers would live simply, like their fellow villagers,
most of whom did not have ready access to wheels. This may in turn reflect a
shift in the vision of the Peace Corps program, from supplying experts (read:
car drivers) to supplying bottoms-up community developers (read: long distance
walkers and combi passengers).
Here in
Goodhope, we walk. A lot. It takes me ten minutes to amble to my school on a
dirt path. It takes Stephanie thirty minutes to walk to her school on a mix of
paved road and dirt paths. Our general dealer (neighborhood store) is a
ten-minute walk. The post office is 40 minutes away. Government offices: 30
minutes. The kgotla (village community center) is also 40 minutes away. When
there is no water coming out of the faucets at home, we only have to walk 5
minutes to a public standpipe, where the odds of fetching water are somewhat
improved.
But our
nearby store has a limited supply of food. Frozen whole chickens are usually
available. There are vegetables on the shelf about half the time. Eggs are
rarely available for sale. There is a limited supply of canned foods, along
with UHT milk and fresh bread. So, to get a balanced diet, we usually go
shopping in Lobatse, where there are several supermarkets. There, we can buy
things that Americans like to eat, such as butter, cheese, sliced ham, coffee, granola,
avocados, lettuce and even coriander.
We travel
to Lobatse each Saturday morning and then back home in the afternoon, loaded
down with our full bags and backpacks. How do we do it? We walk ten minutes out
to the main road and wait for a minibus or van to pick us up. These vehicles
are generically called “combis”, after the famed Volkswagen minibus, named the
Kombi (for Kombinationsfahrzeug). Roger Cohen wrote a tribute to this vehicle
in the New York Times last week. Volkswagen recently stopped manufacturing
them, ending an era that stretched back decades. In recent years, they were
only built in Brazil, which apparently has less rigorous auto safety standards.
As an aside, I drove one of those buses at a summer job in the 1970’s, and can
attest both to their coolness and lack of safety.
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| Here I am waiting to board a combi in Lobatse |
Most of the
combis in Botswana these days were made in Japan, and were driven for several
years there or in other Asian right hand drive countries, like Singapore or
Indonesia. After years of service, they ended up on a boat headed for Durban,
South Africa, for sale around this region. That explains why the combis we ride
in often display Japanese advertising. One golden yellow combi that plies the
route between a remote village and Lobatse sports “Hello Kitty” cartoon
characters on its side panels.
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| Stephanie has that smug look because she grabbed a seat next to a window that opens |
All combis are
registered with the government and (along with taxis) carry a blue license
plate. The drivers must also have a special license. But combis vary greatly in
their cleanliness and maintenance. Most important, they are always overcrowded
and lack air conditioning. The bench seats are too small for adult bottoms and
have little legroom. Jump seats pull down to fill up the aisle space. Standees
often fill up the spot next to the folding exit door or squeeze onto an already
occupied seat. In other words, a van with a capacity of, say, 12 in America may
regularly hold 18 or more in Botswana. Then there is the cargo. On return trips
from Lobatse, Saturday shoppers may carry on board 40-pound bags of maize or
sorghum meal. Young children sit on their mother’s lap.
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| While the combis fill, hawkers sell their wares through the open windows: everything from Cool Time freeze pops to air time (cell phone pre-paid minutes) |
We treat
every combi trip as an adventure. Because scheduling is haphazard, waiting for
a combi to pick us up at our corner stop in Goodhope can take five minutes or it
can take an hour. The vehicle may be half-empty or standing room only. On the
return trip, we pick up a combi at the Lobatse bus rank. Combis leave from
there only after they have filled (or over filled). We may know some of the
other riders on board, and we always exchange pleasantries. In addition to the
driver, there may be a conductor who collects the fares as we drive along the
road. Passengers pass along fare money from back to front, and in turn pass
change from front to back. It costs the equivalent of $1.25 for each of us to
travel one way between Goodhope and Lobatse, a distance of about 30 miles.
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| Combis get quite crowded |
Riding on
combis has the desired effect of making us know more about our fellow
villagers. We observe their interactions with children. We see what sort of
food they buy and what sort of cell phones they use. We note the protocol for
handling a drunken passenger (with tolerance) and a passenger without enough fare
(with disdain). Despite the high heat and close contact, we smell very little
body odor. That reflects the cultural importance placed upon bathing twice a
day.
Sometimes,
wonderful things happen on a combi. Last Saturday, on the ride back from
Lobatse, the conductor mentioned to us that we were the subjects of his
preacher’s Sunday sermon. The preacher held us up as role models to the
congregation because we are a long-term married couple. We are not sure of the
preacher or the church, since there are many formal and informal churches in
Goodhope. We appreciated the shout-out, because unfortunately for various
reasons marriage is not very common in Botswana, and it is one of the drivers
of the HIV epidemic. The conductor congratulated us, and we said thanks. Part
of our service here involves just being who we are – an American married couple
– with the hope that people find something worthwhile to take away from that
simple fact.
Maybe Peace
Corps is on to something with this no-driving-cars rule.
