Skip to main content

Car capacity

The sight of a bunch of one-occupant cars in traffic has always stirred my ire, but since coming back from Cameroon, it irks me even more.

Maybe it’s having seen how many people you can stuff in one vehicle.

Seriously, a vehicle containing only a driver is nearly unheard of in Cameroon. On a trip to Kumba, Mike or Dan might leave the house the sole occupant of the truck (even that was rare), but you could rest assured by the time they’d left the village they'd have a few companions. The truck could be packed to the gills containing all 6 Scotts, me, and a pile of luggage for 2 weeks in Bamenda – and we’d still get requests for passengers to hang off the back bumper.

Even the fancy SUVs on the highway between Yaounde and Douala usually had as many bodies as seatbelts. If ever, by some strange circumstance, the driver was the only human occupant of a vehicle, most likely the rest would be filled with cargo of some sort.

So, now, seeing car after car after car clogging the roadways in Winnipeg with ONE occupant in each really gets my goat (which, in Cameroon, would be tied on top of the bus because there was no room inside).
Labels:

Comments

Tom said…
I am groaning heavily at that joke.

Just so's you know.
October 18, 2008 at 9:16 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My favourite nativity scene

“There’s no accounting for taste.” That’s my dad’s favourite way of explaining personal tastes that are incomprehensible to him, like living downtown, and riding bike in winter. The inexplicable factors which determine an individual’s likes or dislikes are probably the only way I can explain why my favourite nativity scene contains a horribly caricatured black magus, a random adoring child attired – to my fancy – like a Roma person, an old shepherd carrying some sort of blunderbuss. And a haloed holy family with an 18-month-old baby Jesus. This is the "Christmas Manger Set – the Christmas story in beautiful cut-out scenes and life-like figures." See how the 1940s-era family admires the realistic flourishes, like raw wood beams and straw protruding from the edge of the roofline; the rough, broken wood of the stalls; the tasselled camels; the richly dressed magi; the woolly sheep; the Bethlehemites on the path in the background, ostensibly out to get water, judging...
2 comments
Read more

Upside down economics of Jesus: household action and global change

--Presented at a CAWG event in Altona -- In Living More with Less , Doris Janzen Longacre shares a story about envelopes from Marie Moyer, a missionary in India, who was studying Hindi with Panditji. Marie writes: “From his philosophic mind, which probed the meaning of events and circumstances, I learned more than Hindi.” Just before her teacher’s arrival one day before Christmas, she’d received and opened a pile of Christmas cards and discarded the envelopes as he walked in the room. She writes: “He sat down soberly and studied the situation, then he solemnly scolded me: ‘the reverberation of this wasteful act will be felt around the world’.” Marie was stunned. “What do you mean?” she asked him. “Those envelopes,” he said, pointing to the wastebasket. “You could write on the inside of them.” “Chagrined”, Marie apologized and rescued the envelopes with the help of Panditji, who “caressed each one” as he pulled it out of the garbage. This forever changed Marie’s relationship to p...
2 comments
Read more

Broken people...

After reflecting with one coworker on how often churches in all their forms really mess up and hurt a whole bunch of people in the process -- and how "we gotta do better" -- I stumbled into another conversation with a coworker which highlighted our brokenness, and I suddenly realized what was wrong with my take in the first. I wanted the church to be better at fixing our mistakes, or better yet, at not making them in the first place. But maybe this "fix-it" attitude is partly the reason we keep blowing it again and again! My friend recollected an experience when a church community was in a terrible place: compounded mistakes, hurts, and frustrations had blown up, spewing pain all over all parties. (I'm sure anyone with a long history in the church can think of one, if not several, such occasions in their past.) A new Christian who observed all these goings on responded in an unexpected way. Instead of "you people are a bunch of screw-ups! How could this pos...
5 comments
Read more