Jammin' in the Sandbox

You just never know what you’re gonna get when you ride public transportation in this place. The majority of people don’t speak English but you can’t count on the fact that your driver doesn’t understand you. One day, we got in a rickshaw (the little riding lawn mowers, the same things that they have in India…I’ll try to get a picture) and one girls says ‘I hate when they have these flap things, they only make the dust worse.’ And then another girls says ‘Oww…I just sat on the thing and hurt my butt muscle’. And then the driver, without even turning around, replies ‘I’m really sorry about that’. You can just imagine the shock and embarrassment that we felt knowing that he knew that we’d just insulted his ride and referred to inappropriate things in mixed company.

Then today, I got in an Amjad which is sort of like a minivan I guess. It can hold 7 foreigners (about 15 nationals when they squash in there) and they can go ‘long distances’ meaning that they can cross the rivers. Anyways, my driver only spoke Arabic and I’ve gotten pretty proficient in getting where I need to go in Arabic, so I told him where I wanted to go and he said that he knew it. We start driving along and we’re going a different way than normal, but I keep thinking to myself ‘well I guess we can get there from this way’ plus we were jamming to some old school Michael Jackson and some Bryan Adams, so at this point, I was still enjoying the ride. We kept going and kept going until we came out on the road I needed but a mile past where we needed to be. He asked which direction I wanted and I told him left, so he turned right and kept on going. He asked if I wanted to turn around and I told him yes, but he just kept going straight. I kept telling him, ‘I need to turn around’ or ‘turn left here’ but he just kept going. He said some things in Arabic that I didn’t understand, however I know that my Arabic directions were correct but he just kept acting like since I was white he couldn’t understand my Arabic. Eventually I called my language tutor (I was on my way to language and thanks to this guy, already late) and had my tutor give directions. Even then, my driver still didn’t know where we were going, but at least he turned around AND, all the sudden, he could understand my Arabic. He kept trying to turn onto random and obscure roads, but eventually we did make it to my lesson. I hate it when the driver tells you that he knows where you want to go, but really doesn’t and just starts going. Usually they follow your directions if you give them, but this guy….

At least he turned on some clean English music for my extensive ride around town. Usually you get ghetto gangster rap accompanied by a flashing neon light on the inside of the vehicle. I actually think that Eminem and Puff Daddy might be more popular here than in America. And of course it’s unedited, they can’t even understand the words anyways so like they care, and that means that we end up riding up to church with ghetto rap and cuss words blaring. Makes for some interesting pre-sermon conversations.