Combi-Nation

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.