Fender Bender

(I thought about not posting this blog because I didn't want Judi Kimler to think things are dangerous over here but since it's nothing more than a bump in the driveway, I'll tell the story.)

The first thing that you have to understand is that we are not allowed to drive by our company. They provide Mercedes vans and drivers for us. We look like a bunch of tourists being shuttled around like sheep from apartments to work and home again with the occasional business meeting, out of town site visit or shopping on the weekends. I’ve always said that the ultimate luxury I could have in business would be to have my own driver to take me to work. Now I was thinking Limo into Manhattan or something of the sort, not van pool in Tripoli. The second reason that we aren’t allowed to drive is that traffic fatalities are the highest cause of death in the country. The only way that I can describe it is to say, why put lines on the road; they are totally ignored. It can be compared with one of those road races with 10,000 people running down the street; you just weave in and out filling in any empty space. If there isn’t one you just drive in reverse until you find an empty space. For some reason it works. You are starting to see the logic here about us not driving. Now throw in Ramadan on top of all this, remember the aforementioned lack of coffee, food, cigarettes, sleep since they stay up most of the night partying and eating before the morning call to prayer, and you have some scary drivers! We were poking along on one of the major collector streets and traffic was pretty stop and go. We had just pulled past a side street where a cement mixer was trying to pull out. I guess he thought that we should go or he’d help us along but we heard a crunch as he came out and rear ended us at about 3 kph. Now our driver and the driver of the cement truck did what every other Libyan driver does in this type of situation; they both got out of their vehicles, surveyed the damage and started yelling at each other, voices raised, hands flailing, while cars poked around us looking to see what all the fuss was about. Now there were 7 of us in the van so I guessed if things took a turn for the worse, we could pile out and take on one guys but alas it didn’t resort to that. I expected a 30 minute siege so I put my headphones on and listened to some calming music and before you know it, our driver hopped back into the van and started off down the road. I looked over at him and noticed that he had the driver’s license of the truck driver and put it in his pocket. I saw him glancing back in his mirror and realized that the cement truck was following us. We went another kilometer or so and then pulled over at what I guessed to be a police station. You see, most things don’t have signs on them and the ones that do are in Arabic so that’s not much help for a bunch of yahoos who don’t read or write good English much less Arabic. Our driver hopped out and either gave the license back to the guy or someone but was soon back in the van and driving us another couple of blocks to our apartment. I don’t know if he went back or what. All of us just piled into our little cubbyholes, turned on our computers and logged on to see what the outside world has been up to.