The Bus that Lived Murphy’s Law

I couldn’t stand the smell of the bus anymore and my legs were stiff.  I didn’t know how long we had been at this stop, or why we were here.  Mom was next to me, just as uncomfortable and hungry as I was.  We had rushed this morning to make the 9:30am bus.  It wasn’t until four hours later that our bus finally came.  We heard from the Sumry bus officer that our bus coming from Mbeya was having problems.  I remember joking with Mom, saying we should just catch the bus the next day since this one was obviously cursed.  After everything that had happened so far, I was starting to believe this bus operated under Murphy’s Law.  I could almost see the motto written underneath the psychedelic paint-job, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”

I stood up and paced the length of the bus, passing a few people trying to sleep.  A child curled up to his mother, using her dress-like kanga as a blanket.  Most of the passengers were outside getting fresh air.  I had planned to stay on the bus until we left, but we had been stopped for a long time.  I passed Mom’s seat and told her I was going outside.

“Be careful,” she said in the dim light.

I used my ancient Nokia phone as a light to guide my steps off the bus.  I wandered aimlessly around, investigating the reason for the long stop.  There was the man who claimed to be the night bus driver sitting and talking to the other Sumry workers.  I didn’t trust him after he had tried to steal my seat earlier.  In the falling dusk light, he saw me staring at him.  He gave me a look I couldn’t decipher in the dark, but I imagine it wasn’t friendly so I walked on to inspect the building.  I peered inside and saw a desk with large record-keeping books, file cabinets, and hand-cuffs on the wall.  I concluded that this must be some sort of police station.

“We are trying to acquire a permit to drive at night,” a Tanzanian man said as he approached me.  I recognized him for our last extended stop.

———

I started off the bus ride with no seat, even though I had a ticket assigning me to a specific place.  Mom found her seat, but what we thought was my seat was occupied by a sleeping man.  We tried to talk to the conductor about our seats, but he told me to sit on the cushion.  I sat on the cushion beside the driver, holding on to a railing to avoid flying through to window during sudden stops. Even through the cushion, I could feel the heat of the motor, which would have been pleasant in the middle of Minnesotan winters, but not so pleasant in the sweltering Tanzanian heat.  When we came to a police check-point, an officer boarded to inspect the bus.  He kicked off the people who didn’t have a seat.  I showed him my ticket and he told the sleeping man to get out of my seat.

When the police officer left, our bus continued a few paces, stopped, and let the people who had been kicked off back on to the bus.  The man came up to me and tried to get the seat back.  He didn’t speak much English.  The conductor came up to us and tried to get me out of the seat.  He said the man was sick and might throw-up, and needed the window.  The man said he was the night driver and needed his sleep.  Mom was not happy at all, but I told her it was alright if the guy was really sick, since some fresh air would do him some good.  Since Mom would not let me sit on the cushion anymore because it was making her sick to see me so close to the front window with nothing to keep me from flying through, I agreed to sit on a crate of coke bottles with a cushion.  The cushion was not much of a buffer against the coke bottles, especially when we hit bumps and pot holes.

I settled into my make-shift seat while the man sat down, cracked open an orange Fanta, and lounged comfortably as if he was feeling miraculously better.  I realized at that moment that he had been lying the whole time.  I felt like a fool for believing him, and now I was stuck on a bumpy bus on top of coke bottles.  No one was madder than Mom.  I tried to calm her anger saying it wasn’t so bad sitting in the aisle, but she wouldn’t believe me.  When we had stopped at a gas station with especially nasty and smelly squatters a few hours later, Mom’s anger exploded.  The man left to go to the choo (toilet), Mom grabbed me off the coke bottle crate and told me to sit next to her in my rightful place.  When the man got back on the bus, and tried to get the seat back, Mom argued ferociously as only a mother can who’s cubs have been put in danger or treated unfairly.  The man would give up trying to get the seat back.

“My seaty, give my seaty. Bus-y will crash if I don’t have my seaty to shleep,” he said over, and over again.  Mom is not usually intimidated by threats and it only fueled her anger.

“Hapana! Sumry should have given you a seat, but we paid for this one. Pole sana!” Mom retorted back.

This time the conductor kept his distance and tried not to get involved in the argument.  There was nothing the night bus driver could do.  He sat on the cushion next to the day bus driver, extending his legs to the window and laying his head one of the passenger’s bags.  This was probably his original spot before he tried to steal mine.

As we were driving not long after the seat incident, two tires on the left side blew out at the same time.  It sounded like an explosion underneath our seats, but when I saw there was no fire and I was still alive, I deduced the tire had blown directly under me.  We pulled over and the Sumry workers and drivers inspected the wheels.  Everyone got off the bus, except Mom and me, since we didn’t want to give up our seats again.  A Tanzanian man turned to us before he exited the bus.

“I’m glad you got your seat.  Some people here think they can take advantage of muzungus (white people).  I’m sorry he treated you like that,” he said in flawless English.  We talked for him a while longer before he got off the bus.  I watched as baboons walked by, keeping their distance, but watching the drama they didn’t understand unfold.  It was starting to get dark, too dark to read my book.  I looked at my phone clock.  Just after 19:00. We were supposed to arrive in Moshi around 21:00, but we were hardly four hours from Iringa.  I didn’t want to get into Moshi bus station at three in the morning, knowing few taxis were operating and shady people hung out in that area.  There was nothing we could do but wait.  Finally when it was completely dark, the wheels were fixed and we were on our way to Mikumi.

———–

I turned to the Tanzanian man.

“Why do we need a permit?” I asked him.

“It’s illegal for passenger buses to drive at night for danger reasons.  If you want to drive, you need a special permit, but they are hard to acquire.  We might be here for a long time,” he replied.

I returned to the bus to tell Mom the news.  She simply sighed and shook her head.  I sat in my seat next to her and tried to get in a sleeping position.  The night bus driver came on the bus and walked purposefully towards the back.  Tanzanians don’t normally move fast or purposefully, so when they do, you pay attention to what is going on.  After a few minutes, he came back to the front and muttered something about “he must be dead.” Mom and I thought he was making a joke after trying to steal our seat earlier to lighten the mood.  We should have known that the English colloquialism “dead tired” is not in Tanzanian vernacular.

The conductor announced in Kiswahili that we must leave the bus, which the kind Tanzanian man translated for us.

“Why do we have to leave?  Are we getting on a different bus? Did we get a permit?” I asked him.

“A man has died on the bus and they must remove his body before we continue our safari,” he replied in a calm voice, as if a man dying on our bus was a natural thing.  If someone died on a bus back home in the States, people would be freaking out.  Not in Tanzania.  Death is just as natural as birth, and seems to be ever present in this society.  I’ve met two other Tanzanians who died a few weeks after I met them.  To me, it’s an eerie experience.

As a few Sumry workers attempted to lift and carry the body off the bus with great effort, I wondered how long the man had been dead while we were traveling.  Apparently he had been sick before getting on the bus and with all the problems the bus had been having as well as the lack of medical attention and food, such stresses were too much for his diseased body.  I’ve never been in a room where someone has drawn their last breath.  I didn’t even know the man and yet somehow he had been alive when he got on the bus, and now his body was being carried off the bus, lifeless.

The Sumry workers put the body in a car and it was driven off into the night.  We were told we could get back on the bus.  I got back on tentatively, sniffing the air for death.  All I could smell were sweaty people and smoke from refuse burning in a nearby shamba (garden).

Sweat smells different here.  When people get sweaty back home, it is usually from some activity recently done so they sweat has a sweet and salty smell to it.  In Tanzania, showering is not a daily or an every other day activity.  The heat beats down on bodies, and pores ooze with recently consumed Tanzanian spices, mixing with dirt, grit,and dried sweat from earlier to create a particular odor to here.  I realize it is not considered P.C. to comment on other’s body odors, especially when it pertains to another culture, but it was one of the first things I noticed when I arrived to Tanzania, and it’s captured my interest and nostrils.

Once everyone got back on the bus, we finally set off.  I figured two flat tires and a man dying on the bus was enough to persuade the police to give us a permit to drive through the night.  The night bus driver had taken over driving now.  I prayed he wouldn’t try to crash the bus because of the whole seat incident.  Considering everything that had happened, perhaps the seat incident seemed insignificant.  I looked out the front window and realized we were following a taxi down side roads much too narrow for the bus.  We bumped along uncomfortably for twenty long minutes.  At the end of the side road route, the taxi stopped and a Sumry worker got out to hop onto our bus.  I thought it strange, but I was so tired that I didn’t question it.

Close to midnight, we stopped at a trucker stop to get food since none of us had eaten since the morning.  The food was badly kept, but we decided to order chipsi mayai(basically eggs and potatoes fried together).  The kind Tanzanian man came up to us and asked if we had seen the conditions of the food.  We told him we were hungry.  As they were preparing it, I needed to go to the bathroom, but didn’t want to wander around a Tanzanian trucker stop at night to find one.  I asked the man if he knew where the choo was, and he pointed the way.  When I hesitated, he asked if I needed protection. I looked around at the truckers staring at me and replied yes.  We were cat called by the truckers, but no one approached while he was with us.  He lead Mom and me to the squatters and waited for us.  When we returned to get our food, we realized the man making our food had given it away.  Maybe it was better that way since we could have gotten very sick from the food.  The kind Tanzanian man who had been watching out for us all night was mad at the man, but we told him it was alright, the bus was starting up to go anyways.  Luckily, we still had some trail mix and digestive cookies to munch on.

I was relieved to leave the trucker stop.  For the next few hours as we drove through the night, I fell in and out of consciousness. I remember snippets of the drive.
We drove through Mikumi National Park and I remember watching herds of impala gathering on either side of the road, timing their mad dash just before the bus could hit them.  It was like driving in Minnesota at night to avoid deer, only here every few hundred meters herds of impala would run across the road.  The bus swerved a few times to avoid the young and lame ones who couldn’t time their cross properly.  I decided it was best not to watch, so I closed my eyes and drifted back to sleep.

The next time I opened my eyes, I realized we had been stopped by a policeman. With my limited knowledge of Kiswahili, I could understand that our bus driver was telling him we were stopping in the next town to rest.  So we never did get that permit.  That must have been why we followed a taxi through side roads earlier.  My eyelids were heavy and soon I was back asleep.

I vaguely remember people getting off the bus on a few occasions, and Mom changing positions to avoid getting stepped on or hit by luggage.

The last time I woke up, I could see blue pre-dawn light.  I sleepily watched the country-side roll by.  An hour or so later we stopped somewhere to go to the bathroom.  I stretched my legs outside and peered up at a nearby mountain shrouded in mist and fog.  I figured we must be getting close to Mt. Kilimanjaro by now.  We got back on the bus and continued on.  My mind was blank as I started out the window.  I was passed being hungry.  I could only sit, weakly slumped in my seat.  I could tell Mom hadn’t slept much with a boy sitting on the coke bottle crate next to her, and another man sitting close to our luggage.

At 9:30am, we arrived in Moshi, 24 hours after the bus was supposed to leave Iringa the previous day.  A taxi driver we knew picked us up and brought us home.  Not having the energy for anything else, we made ramen noodles, and slept the rest of the day.

I don’t really believe in Murphy’s Law, but this bus did seem to have it’s fair share of mishaps.  However, we survived and were not hurt in anyway, so I guess not everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong in the end…