Unexpected perks of the job

This morning I woke up at dawn, put on my best lilac shirt and drove 50kms out of Kinshasa to go visit a police training centre where some 200 drivers were taking their off-road driving exam. To pass the test, each driver had to successfully drive 2.5 kms along the rough, battered, narrow, crevasse-filled, muddy 20 km circuit that runs around the centre. The instructors explained to me mournfully that some parts of the circuit had become so bad in the past few years that even they had difficulty getting the vehicles through.

Next thing I know, I’m the one driving the police 4x4 pick-up truck with some twenty amused, sniggering trainees in the back, taking the circuit the wrong way around (at the insistence of the main instructor) so that the impassably steep and crevassed downhill bits have become impassably steep and crevassed uphill bits, and wondering more than once if the whole vehicle isn’t just going to tip over entirely. Considering that the last police officer who crashed a police vehicle is still rotting in jail two weeks later, I wasn’t feeling particularly relaxed, and in fact my left leg was trembling uncontrollably every time I pushed in the clutch.

Against all odds, however, I did pretty well – except for one point where the trainees had to get down and stood on either side of the trail shouting contradictory instructions as I desperately tried to get this monstrous vehicle up an almost vertical track with a massive ravine down the middle so that there was virtually no road for the tires to grip onto. Still, I made it through, and I am soon to become the proud owner of an off-road driver’s certificate from the Congolese Police. Can’t wait to put that on my CV!

My lovely lilac blouse didn’t do so well out of the experience, however.

This was the easy bit, coming back down!