The Taxi Ride

I am told by locals that this spring is exhibiting more typical weather than last year. Last year, I remember sporadic thunder, lightening and rain storms that pummeled our little town with electricity black outs coinciding with each storm. This season we have experienced the same conditions only continuously, not sporadically. Familiar roads are indistinguishable now that 50 shades of green have replaced the 50 shades of brown of winter. It’s amazing how quickly a windy, dusty, brown environment can be transformed into a wonderland of color; flowers, lush green grass covering the rolling hills, pools of water everywhere and huge old trees that leaf out in a matter of days it seems. Our torrential storms have pushed the town reservoir that I walk by each day to the limit. The day after the “taxi ride,” rain water surged over the dam and was creating a mini-river heading down town toward the township…..

I had attended a Diversity Committee meeting in Pretoria and wanted to spend the night at home in my own bed, not in a backpacker’s hostel, which is the cheapest form of accommodation that fits our budget for Peace Corps volunteers. Arriving at the taxi rank at about lunchtime, I spied a full taxi just leaving for home. Darn! What that meant was that I would now have to wait until an empty taxi filled with 14 to 24 people, depending on how many people could be scrunched into the taxi….. and for my destination, that meant that I would have to wait in the taxi for 3 to 31/2 hours until it pulled away for home. This system of travel works very well except that taxis only depart when every bench in the van is packed to the ceiling and squished with people, babies, luggage and miscellaneous odds and ends So, I and another man heading in my direction decided to bet that we could find another taxi more quickly going half-way home to a large urban area and then catch another taxi from there to home. That part of the plan worked find. But, again, bad luck. As we pulled into Witbank, I spied my taxi brimming full heading out of the taxi rank. #?!/*!&# is what I said because now I did indeed have to fill another taxi to get home, there were no other choices..…and I waited 3 hours and 15 minutes until we pulled away from the rank, the sky darkening.

I looked out to the horizon in the cloudy weather and saw one tiny spot with lightening bolts sprouting every which way….I bet that’s home, I thought….. Little did I or any of the others passenger know that we would speed towards the most ferocious storm of the season, in the dark. I was sitting in the front seat and actually had a functioning seat belt, which is unusual. There are never seat belts in taxis. It started raining hard with a lot of wind. The taxi’s wind shield wipers worked fine but the condensation of the packed vehicle clouded all the windows. As the driver attempted to clear a tiny circle of glass for visibility with his bare hand every 5 minutes, we would veer over to the edge of the narrow road to where the water was piling up. He did decrease his speed from 75mph to 50mph but it wasn’t slow enough for me. On the roads to my town, it is pitch-black dark, there are no fences which prevent animals from crossing the road and there is no shoulder on the road. Someone from the back of the van tossed up a role of toilet tissue to me and I spent the remainder of the trip trying to keep the wind shield clean so the driver could see where he was going. The closer we got to home, the more flooding occurred. We crept into town, the streets flooded, people on this busy Friday night struggling to find shelter and looking for rides home to the township….chaos. I had phoned my host parents that I needed a ride home when I arrived and I never was so glad to see their smiling faces as they pulled up to the dark taxi rank where I sat waiting.