Car Troubles

I had a blog post in mind.  I was going to start with a picture somewhat like this:

and the dramatic announcement that it was kind of ours, and at least that I was driving it.  Which would mean that anyone who has visited a country like Uganda would think I am absolutely insane to drive, like my husband does.  But I've been here for a while now, and once you kind of understand it the traffic isn't really that bad.  Everyone goes slowly, anyways.

Our American neighbor recommended hiring a car to me, and the company that she uses.  She had been very helpful by driving us around to places, and she said it wasn't really that bad and she wouldn't recommend anything that wasn't safe.  I was planning mostly on driving around our area of town, so I could do things like get groceries, and take the kids to the pool or playground, and visit friends.

It seems like every place we have moved to has gotten more isolated, which isn't a coincidence.  The only towns that are actully on our end of Ggaba Road are Ggaba itself, and Bbunga, both of which we need to avoid.  Because we apparently got tangled up with some crazy crime ring in Ggaba (I'm exaggerating; I don't know that it's a ring, but I don't know that it isn't), and the girls' birth family is around Bbunga.  I have nothing whatsoever against seeing their birth family, but it gets a little awkward bumping into them whenever we go out the door; I would rather have the chance to mentally prepare myself.  And Bbunga is not nearly far enough away if it is a crime ring. So by now we're way up in the hills on the upscale side of Ggaba road, and a car would be increasingly less inconvienant.

We had "hired" the car about five days ago.  But it took the entire first day for it just to show up (at about 11 at night), and then the next day it went out for a check-up and oil change, which took two days to reappear.  When it came back, I asked the driver to come too because we had a lot of errands, and he drove us around for the day.  I was going to go grocery shopping the next day, but we were tired and didn't leave the house.  I had driven a couple of short distances, like moving from one house to the other, and back from Ggaba Road where the driver left me, but yesterday was the first day I properly drove for an entire outing.

And.... disaster.  The driving wasn't actually that difficult, even though I ended up going downtown, I had a good navigator.  The traffic was manageable, and it does pretty much make sense, in a kind of free-flowing way.

But when we came out of the show, the car was missing.  What happened to it?  I can give you a short story here, but it took hours to figure out.  Some company that repossess cars, or something like that, towed it away.  Maybe the owner had fines on it, or maybe a previous renter had gotten tickets, but somehow the car was in this data-base of cars that could be taken away, and it got impounded.  We are still very unclear on why.  Supposedly they are only supposed to take cars with millions of shillings owed on them, and also they should have informed the church it was parked near that they were taking it (so their security team doesn't spend hours looking for criminal evidence), so possibly it was a way over-enthusiastic towtruck guy.  The owner of the car showed up after a while, apparently yelled at everyone (I was out looking for the car with the security guys), and eventually reported that she owed 18,000 shillings on the car but they company wanted 60,000 (which is about $8 vs $30, so not a huge amount of money).  Monica said later that she was lying, and the company wouldn't take the car unless it had millions of shillings owed.  Unless, of course, the car repossessing company was cheating, which is perfectly likely.  There also could be a yet unknown entity that was cheating both the other parties.  A literal interpretation of truth is not exactly a big cultural value around here.  And once money gets involved, there is no reason to trust anything that you hear.

As far as I'm concerned, luckily I only paid for two days upfront for the car, and I would kind of like my carseat, books, and sweaters back, but other than that I don't mind just plain walking away from the problem.  They said that they would un-im-pound the car and get it back to me on Monday, but we'll see about that.  Sometimes the best option is to say "hmm"  and just get home.  And after a great deal of fussing about, the owner and driver did go and find a "special hire" for us and pay him to drive us home.  (Which, by the way, was even more people -- since we had the driver too -- and in a significantly smaller car.  There was one mom and six children in the small back seat!)

So, will I accept the car again on Monday?  Or look for a different company or a different car?

On the one hand is the instinct I wrote about last night: that we should just hide under the bed until someone offers us visas, or at least until school starts up again.  That it seems like everything that could go wrong, promptly is doing just that, and we should just plain avoid everything.

But on the other hand, what is the point of spending our opportunity to live in a foreign country hiding in fear?  I've been feeling really grumpy, but maybe it would be possible to eke out a few more wonderful memories out of our unexpected extra time here, instead of sitting around sulking for the next few weeks.  And that was part of the point of the car: that with a car and school vacation, we could actually do a few little fun outings.

Not to mention, grocery shopping.  It makes the project so much easier to just drive, especially with all three kids.  My husband keeps mentioning that I could just hire the car and driver, which I could, but that just takes more planning, and I feel a little stupid having a driver along for simple outings; I guess I'm just used to taking care of myself!  I don't feel weird when we have a bunch of errands to do, and especially downtown it feels safer to leave someone with the car and the things.  But just to go to the grocery store?  That's a lot of planning for one little trip.  Or at day at the pool?  It just feels silly to pay someone to sit around all day while we swim.  And I can't help adding the cost of the car and the driver to the day's expense, and quickly it becomes too expensive to do much of anything.  Like driving to a playground across town, which would be maybe 10 or 20 thousand shillings per child plus lunches.  Add 100 thousand for the driver and eh?, why go?  ($4-8 dollars for the entrance fee, $40 to drive over.)  And then I combine errands and don't get a car very often, and we sit around and stagnate most of the time, and then do these crazy long errand days which leave everyone grumpy.

Actually, the best solution is to JUST GO HOME, where we have a very nice car just sitting in the driveway (costing us money), and not only that, we have PLACES WORTH GOING TO.  Like playgrounds that aren't $24 to just walk in the door.


Now with that little rant over, I need to decide what to do tomorrow morning, which is almost Christmas Eve and no one is going to feel like handing us a visa or two even if I grump about it.  It could be that the repossessing company was trying to get a little extra money out of a fairly honest owner, in which case I might as well take the car back.  In their favor, they handled most of the other details well and courteously towards me.  Or, this car owner lady could be a total scammer, and it could be a stolen car that she was renting to me or something dramatic like that, and I shouldn't go near her with a ten-foot pole.  In which case, I could ask another friend for a recommendation of a more honest car to hire.  Or I could assume that other random things will continue to go wrong, and just hole up at home and forget the car idea.

I am trying to come up with a nice concluding statement for this story, but nothing is coming to mind.  Kind of like everything else in my life.