‘Good Samaritan’
Twenty years ago this July: 2 PM
Somehow, I lost most of yesterday as Daniel and I flew on three planes to Harare, Zimbabwe. Mysteriously, we flew right over Zim to Matopu, South Africa. We’re not sure why. We woke up, and there we were. They told us to remain in our seats. I had to pee. They said the bathrooms were dirty. I had to wait. They evidently have never seen the long drop (outhouse, as we call them in America) at our kid’s house. Trust me, I know ‘dirty’.
The rest of the day and night was a blur, really. We landed in Harare, Zimbabwe as planned, and found Robin’s life there very nice; she’s a teacher now, really good at her job. We exchanged money on the black market for an astronomical 430,000 Zim per $1 US. We bought fuel for 19 million Zim dollars and tried to hide the rest of the bundles of money under the seats…We were there to wait 24 hours for Nicky’s plane due to arrive at 2:05 PM tomorrow. But tomorrow came, and 2:05 PM passed us by. Nicky’s plane was delayed. We finally found her exhausted face at almost 5 PM, when it was too late to leave Harare for Chiredzi. It’s a five-hour drive and totally not safe to be on the road after dark, or at least Robin didn’t want to attempt the challenge. She wanted to leave early the next morning instead. However, Daniel didn’t want to waste another moment apart from Robin’s younger sister, his girlfriend, and the reason he’s so desperate to get somewhere. Nicky just wants to sleep, and I didn’t really want to repack the car; however, I didn’t want to die either. It was a toss-up.
As we were pulling out of the airport parking lot, the text message came in from Smithy, Robin’s mom – it read ‘go ahead and drive slow’. So we did. Robin halfway wondered if the message was from her mom or her younger sister, who just wanted to see Daniel as well. Regardless, we started driving.
Let me preface the rest of the chapter by saying: I have yet to hear a success story of travel at night from Harare to Chiredzi. They all consist of broken windows and robbery, some type of engine catching fire, what have you… But we prayed and were on our way. There’s rarely another car on the Musvingo Road, which is good and bad. We have a cell phone, but the signal is spotty. We have a full tank of fuel, thousands of illegal US dollars, 2 cameras, a dvd player, a laptop computer and a slew of other amenities to confiscate. Anyways, we’re thinking positively, we only have 5 hours to go.
Besides the four of us, we also have 2 huge backpacks, 3 roller suitcases, and a guitar. Nicky and I were pretty snug in the back seat of the Mazda 323, while Robin and Daniel switched up the driving. Robin had made us some tasty tuna fish sandwiches on rolls. I don’t eat crust. I’m also a little old for lectures at this point on how rolls don’t have crust and on how I’m crazy. “Of course, I know that!” The ‘crazy’ part that is. All bread has an edge, and I don’t like the edge. What’s the big deal? The tuna sandi’s were good, and Daniel was smart enough to drop the subject and enjoy our car snack.
At about 9 PM, Daniel started driving. I was dead asleep. Couldn’t even lift my head. I didn’t see any of it happen.
“The dog had a death wish!”, Daniel repeated over and over.
He said IT just bolted out from the side of the pitch-dark road. There was nothing he could do. The brakes went on, and the car swerved off to the wrong side of the road. I guess the dog and several body parts were hurled into mid-air before I woke up.
If you think about it, this is all British Airways fault. Nicky’s plane was insanely delayed. We had our entire trip planned out. It never involved dead dogs or bush people or those bodies scattered along the roadway from drunk driving, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
I woke up—there was smoke or thick steam rising from the bonnet—that’s what they call a carhood in Zimbabwe. Daniel’s face started to morph into panic. Robin frantically searched for a phone signal. We need a Plan A and a Plan B, we need some options, I like options. It’s cold here in winter. There’s one dark grass hut by the road where someone may or may not live. Either way, this is one of those moments ‘they’ warn you about not getting into. This is one of those moments that form the basis of timeless horror stories.
So I climbed back in the car to warm up. I locked the doors as if that would greatly protect me, but all of a sudden I could hear my mom in my head, ‘Lock your doors, there are carjackers, I don’t need a dead daughter in a ditch somewhere!’ She was right.
Even worse, though, was Robin and Nicky courageously walking up the road to the top of the hill in search of a phone signal. Daniel and I waited in the car for them to return. Suddenly, there were foreign voices in the tribal language. I panicked, Dan jumped out of the car. I thought about hiding, but when I heard Nicky speak to them in Shona, all was well—they were simply looking for cell reception too. Turns out the only signal remotely available was right where our car landed.
Robin tried and re-tried. Finally. We got through to Tore. He normally lives for these rescue-type missions, although I’m sure he wasn’t pleased with the thought of his daughter 90ks away, stranded in a broken car or being dragged out of bed. If Tore was only 90ks away, that means by our calculations we had at least an hour's wait. Out came the DVD player, and the pillow—yet we were far from safety.
Car after car whizzed by, not many, but enough to make us feel truly abandoned by the living. “Good Samaritan?!” we’d all joke out loud as the only light would pass us by. We all somehow thought that if it were us in that car, we would stop to help. But, eventually, it was our light—our salvation that pulled up. It was Dez Naude and Mike Ball, and our dad, Tore. They jumped right to work, barely a ‘hello’, barely a moment to waste in explanation. They brought the big Safari vehicle and a trailer to load the car and pull us right home to Chiredzi.
Daniel felt so horrible, as if he had deliberately done something awful, like eat the forbidden fruit or steal a cookie freshly baked for someone more special. I had never seen this guilty side of Daniel, and I felt his morbid pain as well when the reality of our desperation finally woke me up completely.
The car perfectly fit on the trailer. There were toasted sandwiches and hot coffee and even Oreos imported from South Africa to comfort the cold ride of 90ks home to Chiredzi. These men worked fast and furiously, and we were on our way. Until – until Mr. Naude slammed on the brakes—the big rugged safari truck came to a full stop. There was an accident. A taxi van had most definitely flipped over. The front was smashed up, the windshield gone, and a man ran towards us—frantic.
We all jumped out in some mad dash to help – bodies could be anywhere – it’s dark – they’re dark. It’s a fresh accident. I hear Daniel yelling, gasping,
‘It’s a huge gash on her leg’.
‘Should I get out my bandages?’ I ask, but no one answers.
Looking up at our car loaded high on the trailer, not knowing where they’re located, I turn to Nicky. Nicky reminds me that we have rubber gloves, and she is right, we should most definitely get those out first. Tore counts the people, the injured loudly – he’s at 3 or 4 somewhere in the darkness when Mr. Naude says,
‘There’s nothing we can do. Let’s get to the police and send an ambulance.’
He’s kidding, right?
It’s better if we leave them all here, bleeding?
What if the ambulance is out of fuel?
What if the ambulance driver is drunker than the taxi van driver?
What if there was a bigger accident in town and no one is able to come?
We’ll waste time; we can help them now, can’t we?
‘There’s nothing we could do. This is not our car. We don’t know how far away from town we are. Mr. Naude rescued us in the middle of the night, we must be grateful,’ I tried every sort of reasoning, but the words didn’t seem to console us. These are the moments when life regrets are made. The ones when you tell yourself over and over and over that you shouldn’t have driven at night; you shouldn’t have been selfish and left the smashed up van of people to die. The moments you write stories about—the kind of stories embedded in memory, but not easily verbalized.
This is Africa.
I’ve seen the myriad of obstacles that await us at the police station, and especially at the government hospital. ‘These people may die’ is all I thought as we pulled away in our nice safari truck with our hot coffee and our toasted sandi’s – there’s plenty of room in the truck for more people, for bleeding people. Daniel’s face morphed back into that panic position. Tore yelled out the back window for Robin to find a phone signal. Maybe we could phone ahead to Smithy, maybe we could get the ambulance up and running sooner than later. Maybe we could make up for deserting these helpless victims. Or maybe a real ‘Good Samaritan’ will drive by right after us and stop and save these people.
It’s now 2 AM. Only now it’s tomorrow, which means today has lasted for two days. If only Nicky’s plane were on time from J-burg. If only we had stayed the night in Harare. If only we had stopped to really help those people.
THE END.
