Breakdowns most inconvenient

By Tony Ngare

Every time we assembled for prayers after a successful family gathering up country, my late grandmother would always pray for the cars that we would ride in on our way back to the city.

In her prayers there was a constant refrain: "God help my children to travel safely, for they are using vehicles that have been constructed by bare human hands." I could not fully appreciate the hullabaloo about cars that have been made by men until I was an adult. All she meant was that since the cars were man-made, they were liable to malfunction or breakdown.

Impatience among motorists when one suffers mechanical problems on the road is legendary. Any motorist will tell you that cars have a habit of grinding to a halt without warning. Yet, when this happens to someone else in front of him, the same motorist will practically sit on the car horn.

Unless you’re a trained mechanic, says my friend Bena, you can’t be expected to keep your car in top condition and deal with all the difficulties you might be unfortunate enough to suffer.

Bena shared with me an incident he recently suffered.

"I was driving to my office, as I do every day, and the moment the lights turned green at the roundabout, the car refused to start!"

Just like Bena, many motorists usually switch off their engines to save on fuel, after all aren’t we in the middle of a crippling financial meltdown?

The next thing Bena knew, almost 100 cars were blaring their horns in unison even as he put on the hazards to signify he was in some sort of mechanical distress. His clutch wouldn’t engage.

"What did they think I was doing?" he posed, "Parked in the middle of the highway?" he continued, obviously livid.

As if to add salt to injury, he had been to the garage two days earlier.

"The previous week, I had taken the damn car to the garage to have it tuned. They failed to warn me about the clutch, but they sure advised me on many other things the car needed, such as a new pair of fasteners for the radiator," he quipped.

Blinking hazard lights

Despite the blinking hazard lights, motorists, after they had successfully managed to elbow, cut in or simply persuade other motorists to give way, would look at him as if he was a chief suspect in a murder case.

Back in the day, our high school bus driver would tell us fairy tales about cars and driving. As students at a modest school in the bush, his word on cars was obviously sacred to us.

I remember one time he told us that it was illegal to open a Mercedes car bonnet by the roadside. Actually he went a step further and said, even the owner was not allowed to open the bonnet. These had us wondering, "If he could not open the bonnet, then how would he repair the car?"

By then we knew cars broke down often, though our school bus (lorry, actually) seemed to need little motivation to cheat us of a long awaited trip.

"Have you ever seen a Mercedes car broken down by the road?" he would ask. Of course mere mortals from the village had not had a good look at a Mercedes leave alone a stalled one. It would take a few years of urban living to finally see a broken down Mercedes and when it happened, it was a great spectacle for me.

— tonyngare@eastandard.net