Traffic and Faith

Many things are different when a person decides to move from a small town in Idaho to teach school in a large city in the Dominican Republic. People everywhere speak in an unintelligible language making it virtually impossible to do even the simplest tasks without a translator with you. A wiry, lanky black man with a basket of green fruit on his head walks down the street in the morning crying out “aguacate”(ah-gwah-cah-tay) in a tone that carries into the deepest part of every apartment within a two block radius. (By the way, Carol says this man sings out the “A” note on the first three syllables and “A-sharp” on the last one.) One cannot put toilet paper in the toilet. You never have to use Chap Stick. Carol’s hair has turned wavy. The storm drains run above ground in cement ditches along the side of the road. Water cannot be drunk out of the faucet so we have to order a five gallon jug of drinking water every few days from a local “Colmado” which are located every few blocks all around the city.

But the greatest difference that I encounter every day is the traffic. At first I just figured the differences I see are attributed to “city” traffic verses “Idaho” traffic, but then I talk with people who have lived and drive in cities like New York and they claim that there is a fundamental philosophical difference between the way the people drive here and the way we drive in the United States.

On Friday I asked for a personal day off from my teaching so that Carol and I could take a bus from here in Santiago to the capital in Santa Domingo. The trip is only an hour and a half but it takes an additional half hour to negotiate the traffic once we hit the city which has almost three million people in it. Our daughter is near the capital right now and we are trying to make arrangements for her to come up to Santiago to live in a few months, so we went down to see her.

Sitting in the relative security of the top level of the Greyhound-style bus I could purvey the tangled array of cars, trucks, motor cycles, and pedestrians to the side and ahead of me. The highway resembles a four lane freeway like we would see entering into any larger city, but as soon as it gets near the city the two lanes going our way suddenly becomes four … maybe five … lanes, if you want to call it “lanes”. There are no markings so cars navigate into any space that is wide enough to fit a vehicle into.

At every stop light several people wind their way between the cars like ants searching for food with an array of merchandize to tempt the drivers … newspapers, cell phone chargers, steering wheel covers, cell phone calling cards, fruit, bottled water, fruit … anything that can be exchanged for money in less than 60 seconds. Motorcycles thread their way through the fabric of traffic between the cars to save a few seconds of time. And cars from side roads push their way into traffic with the unwritten rule that whoever has his nose in first wins. So cars are at all angles to each other in this mass of traffic.

We notice that the same “feel” of traffic is here in Santiago as I have described in our trip to the capital. Since it is dangerous to be out on the streets after dark we called a taxi in order to go back home a few nights ago after having supper with some new friends that we met at the school. The taxi we called couldn’t find the apartment where we were (another difference in this country is an entire city with no discernable pattern in addresses) so we had to walk down to the main street and hail a passing taxi. After squealing to a stop a young man in a tired looking car with a taxi light on the top motioned us over. After giving him our broken-Spanish directions he roared off as if someone had dropped a checkered flag. The man appeared to be late for something and the next few minutes we were seriously wondering if we would survive the less-than-a-mile home without some kind of accident. We had already tried to find the seat belts without any luck. In the headlights I saw roosters, dogs, and people scurry out of the way as they heard the roar of his approaching engine and the splash of the puddles as he hit the numerous potholes on this rainy night.

Up to this point, when the conversation turns to the traffic with some of my fellow sojourners, I have often detected the attitude that the way people drive here is not good or bad, just simply different, and you have to learn to drive just like them. There is even a sense of humor as you point out the ludicrous as it passes by … a pickup truck whizzing by with 7 or 8 people sitting in the back, motorcycles with two, sometimes four, people on it wearing no helmets and having only flip flops on for shoes, small children ... even babies ... squeezed between two or three adults on a motor cycle as if it were simply a very small car, a motorcyclist pushing with one foot a man on a bicycle as he moved along a busy street at 25 miles per hour during rush hour………

But I am losing my sense of humor lately when I see this kind of driving. If it makes no difference how you drive except what country you are in, then why have laws at all. Let the law of the jungle prevail! But are the driving habits of some countries better? I believe they are, and when one ignores that fact and justifies it on the basis of “it is just the culture”, there can be serious ramifications.

On the way home from school one afternoon this past week I was looking out the window of the school bus at nothing particular trying to wind down after a hectic day on the 15 minutes ride home. Right in front of me as if I were watching some violent cop show on wide screen HD television I watched a car crash into a man on a motorcycle as he tried to cut in front of him at an intersection. The motorcyclist was hurled into the air as he was thrown over the car onto the pavement and against the curb as his motorcycle went careening into traffic. He had no shoes, no helmet. On the return trip of my bus a few minutes later we passed by the same intersection and I saw him leaning against his mangled bike on his feet, so by God’s grace this man was still alive. In another event recently a man with only one leg was begging at a stop light while one of my friends was waiting. He had time to ask how he lost his leg. It was a recent motor cycle accident.

On the way to the capital on Friday a man named Rene picked us up at 5:30 in the morning. He is a school bus driver for our school and a very dependable Christian man that we wanted to help us to make sure we found the right bus on time. Rene is now dead. We received a phone call from our school telephone tree that he was killed in an auto accident a day after he dropped us off. He was buried on the same day with a memorial scheduled each day at his house for nine days afterwards in the Dominican custom. In a poor tropical country very few are embalmed and they have to be buried within 24 hours.

In just the few weeks that I’ve lived here my life has been tragically touched on several levels because of the way people drive and the disregard for safety. This is one reason that we will probably not be getting a car anytime soon. The crazy way that people drive in this country is a reality that I have to cope with, and I am not going to change an entire country’s driving habits because I complain about it, but I don’t have to excuse it.

Before coming here in August the Lord gave me a verse of Scripture that I decided to commit to memory because I had a hunch that it had some truth that I would be needing to rely on many times:
The eternal God is thy refuge,
And underneath are the everlasting arms. Deut 33:27a

Traffic has become simply one more area that I've added to the list of things I have to trust the Lord for on a more urgent and daily basis than I did in the States.