Well, It's Africa...: The African DMV: “How did we get here?! Here??”

As our friend Julie loves to quite aptly point out, there are moments when we look at her family and ours and say, “How did we get here?! Here.” Surreal, strange moments have abounded for us Americans as we’ve navigated life in Africa after growing up in a different concept of normalcy. Crazy moments. Traveling across South Africa with all of our possessions in the trunks of three identical cars. Screaming and retreating into the house after our mango picking was interrupted by swarms of mating termites gathering in our hair. Cleaning dead birds out of our kitchen sink while looking for delinquent elephants a remote three hours from the nearest semblance of a village. Watching the aftermath of a housekeeper who convinced Julie’s teenager to drive her to pick up a stolen bathtub when his parents were teaching school. Just a few weeks ago Julie and I found ourselves in a doctor’s office together, answering each other’s questions regarding frequency of diarrhea before learning that said doctor – who we’ve been going to for over a year- is actually a veterinarian. And then last weekend, baking in a hot car while my four year old, Jonas, Julie, and I banged our heads outside of the African equivalent of a DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) we watched a man carry a perfectly balanced queen-sized mattress down the street on his head. “How did we get here?! Here.”

Life is weird.

On a whim my four year old, Jonas, and I found ourselves at the equivalent of a DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) in the village of Bindura, an hour north of Harare, with our friends, their 16 year old daughter Megan, their gardener, a crowd of thirty, and a shotgun wielding guard. As husband Kurt was living it up in a South African hotel of endless food and actual showers, Jonas and I found ourselves easily entertained by the quirky eccentricities of the drivers-permit testing system and a baseball and glove. And boy did we wait.

Why we thought the trip would be fast, none of us knows.

I’ve had some long hellish experiences in the American DMV system, so add a sprinkle of Africa into that and you have a hilarious waiting game involving expired IDs, delayed tests, cramming from the driver’s manual, and some great demonstrations of what not to do while taking a test drive. Though gardener Tapiwa had taken the test twice in our city, bribery (or in his case, a lack of) had gotten in the way. Now we sat with Tapiwa and Megan in this small town of Bindura, surrounded by anti-bribery signs and rifles. It would have been perfect. If Tapiwa’s ID hadn’t expired since his last test. Megan went on to take her test, having studied for weeks from a manual with questions like this:

(a) adjust the mirror because obviously it's pointing at the sky

(c) no… though if the kid's eleven, all bets are off… I love how all of the true/false yes/no questions always have a weird third option.

Most people –if they can scrape together the money- find themselves repeating the written test over and over until their ability to reason has eventually been tainted enough to find hidden logic in questions like the ones above. When Megan came out of the testing room, she explained how every student’s test score was announced out loud after the instructor corrected it with the seated class in waiting. But testers never got to see their test again to learn what they had done wrong. So in the case of Megan, who was just a teeny tiny two questions shy of passing, she could only guess what would have to be changed the next time she lined up for another five hours of DMV fun.

In the end, our car of six people drove away silently, hot, hungry, deflated, and empty handed except for a few pictures of some entertaining signs, and some special rocks Jonas had found in the midst of the driver’s test parking lot. I couldn't help but once again wonder, “How did we get here?! Here.”