4.13.2008
Stuck
Back from India, I found Tanzania awash in the worst of rainy season. Our cars got mired down daily out in the villages but never so bad as the Wednesday after I got back. A group of our staff members got stuck, badly, in the mud at about ten in the morning, and by four that evening were still stuck. They had spent the day searching for a tractor, but they were all out tilling the fields and none were available. The only option was for us to send another truck and a towrope and pull them out.
All the other trucks were late coming back from the field, so I set out with Anton, a lovely Rastafarian staff member with a ton of experience driving in the villages. He volunteered for the task and I was glad to have him along, though I knew he had a heavily pregnant wife at home and she would worry if he was late. The village was far away, and by the time we reached the area, we had only an hour or so of daylight left. Land that is usually dusty and barren was now a lake on both sides of the road, and as we got closer we saw houses that had been knocked over by floods. The road was a joke, a streambed really; it was obvious we would get stuck soon and I fumed that my staff had chosen to try to navigate these ridiculous roads. And then we were stuck, the rear fender of the car resting in the mud, the rear two tires spinning uselessly.
We were near a school and the guards there came out to help as the light waned, but the situation only got progressively more hopeless, no matter how many rocks we threw under the tires, how much pushing they did, or digging, or leveraging with boards. Now we had two cars stuck a mile apart from each other, the batteries on everyone’s cell phones were dying, we were in the middle of nowhere, and it was dark.
But soon a tractor passed the other stuck car which did not have a towrope, and our friends sent it to us, who did. The tractor had no headlight so rumbled up out of the dark, and was almost out of diesel, so the driver yelled at us to hurry. As the men fumbled with the towrope, I jumped behind the wheel. It felt marvelous as the tractor yanked the car out of the mud onto solid dirt. Problem half-solved.
We decided to have Anton walk to the still stuck car, and escort the other staff members to the freed car. I waited at the school, watching the cooking fire of two Masai guards. They said nothing, asked me nothing, and only laughed when an enormous cockroach landed in my hair and I screamed. Finally, Anton and the others emerged from the darkness, all in good spirits and laughing heartily. We piled in the car and began driving out the loooooong way, dropping two of the villagers who had helped us as we went. We finally got to the tarmac road, and at that moment, still at least an hour from town, the sky opened up and dropped the kind of rain that is basically like water poured from a massive bucket. I drove carefully, nervously, slowly through the rain, exhausted and scared and wondering what we could have done differently to avoid this whole mess. We got back to town at one am, Anton's wife in tears and all of us spent.
The next day, we sent another car out to retrieve the one that remained. It got stuck as well, and both had to be rescued by a tractor called away from the fields. They pulled into the office at five pm, both coated with mud, at the exact moment a well-meaning researcher from Northwestern University asked me “And how are the roads in the areas where you work?”.
All the other trucks were late coming back from the field, so I set out with Anton, a lovely Rastafarian staff member with a ton of experience driving in the villages. He volunteered for the task and I was glad to have him along, though I knew he had a heavily pregnant wife at home and she would worry if he was late. The village was far away, and by the time we reached the area, we had only an hour or so of daylight left. Land that is usually dusty and barren was now a lake on both sides of the road, and as we got closer we saw houses that had been knocked over by floods. The road was a joke, a streambed really; it was obvious we would get stuck soon and I fumed that my staff had chosen to try to navigate these ridiculous roads. And then we were stuck, the rear fender of the car resting in the mud, the rear two tires spinning uselessly.
We were near a school and the guards there came out to help as the light waned, but the situation only got progressively more hopeless, no matter how many rocks we threw under the tires, how much pushing they did, or digging, or leveraging with boards. Now we had two cars stuck a mile apart from each other, the batteries on everyone’s cell phones were dying, we were in the middle of nowhere, and it was dark.
But soon a tractor passed the other stuck car which did not have a towrope, and our friends sent it to us, who did. The tractor had no headlight so rumbled up out of the dark, and was almost out of diesel, so the driver yelled at us to hurry. As the men fumbled with the towrope, I jumped behind the wheel. It felt marvelous as the tractor yanked the car out of the mud onto solid dirt. Problem half-solved.
We decided to have Anton walk to the still stuck car, and escort the other staff members to the freed car. I waited at the school, watching the cooking fire of two Masai guards. They said nothing, asked me nothing, and only laughed when an enormous cockroach landed in my hair and I screamed. Finally, Anton and the others emerged from the darkness, all in good spirits and laughing heartily. We piled in the car and began driving out the loooooong way, dropping two of the villagers who had helped us as we went. We finally got to the tarmac road, and at that moment, still at least an hour from town, the sky opened up and dropped the kind of rain that is basically like water poured from a massive bucket. I drove carefully, nervously, slowly through the rain, exhausted and scared and wondering what we could have done differently to avoid this whole mess. We got back to town at one am, Anton's wife in tears and all of us spent.
The next day, we sent another car out to retrieve the one that remained. It got stuck as well, and both had to be rescued by a tractor called away from the fields. They pulled into the office at five pm, both coated with mud, at the exact moment a well-meaning researcher from Northwestern University asked me “And how are the roads in the areas where you work?”.
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