Learning to Drive in Costa Rica

Today's blog entry was crafted into my own words (with permission), but mostly written by one of our team mates, Jamie Wright.

If you’ve never driven in a developing country, simply imagine any action movie’s violent, high-speed car chase - one that includes speeding the wrong way down a one way street, splitting the difference between two cars and zipping between them, playing chicken with an oncoming bus, and every other moment where you thought to yourself, “That would never happen!” Now, take away all road signs and street names, add a bunch of motorcycles, dirt bikes, ox drawn carts, heavy machinery, and stray dogs. And that is what it’s like to drive here.

In the beginning, it was scary for me. Without street names or addresses, I was sure that I would get myself lost to such a degree that I would never return. (I've been lost many times, but I've always managed to get back home again!) Whacky directions are kind of a thing here. Take our home “address”, for example, which looks like this:

1 kilometer north of the San Isidro bridge over the Tibas River - the street that runs along the back side of San Isidro high school. When you see Cusuco's Bar on the left, turn around and go back about 50 meters. Turn in at the black gate on the east side of the street just north of the really huge house in Jardines de Cadaquez. Go 50 meters east and 50 meters south. The last house on the left.

Not. Even. Kidding. If you write that in Spanish on an envelope, the post office will actually deliver the letter to our door!

So, one of the obvious and inherent problems is that, duh, I’m from the U.S. I deal in miles, yards and feet, not kilometers, or meters, or any of the measurements that go with them. And even more duh, I had NO IDEA which way was north, or which way any other way is, for that matter. I know right and I know left. And sometimes I get those mixed up.

Once I managed to figure out how far 50 meters is and learn the critical land marks, there was still the challenge of the "being on the road" part of driving. Everybody drives crazy close to each other here! Most of the time, I can easily put my hand on the car next to me. Or the bus. Or the ox.

Now, it took me awhile, but I’ve actually gotten comfortable on the roads here. I don’t even really think about it anymore. The secret to driving in "crazy town" is knowing your limits.

As simple as that may sound, it's true; the key to driving very, very close to other cars, the trick to navigating through an itty-bitty opening in traffic, is to be keenly aware of the sides of your vehicle, and to have a clear understanding of your car’s capacity. You need to know exactly how far you extend in every direction, how fast you can pick up speed, what you can carry, and how your load impacts your car's performance, and then - this is the important part - you need to move only within those specifications.

If you aren’t clear on these things, you will - for sure - end up getting t-boned by a bus. And then they’ll show every detail on the evening news without even blurring anything out and your gory accident will cause four hours of grid-lock and non-stop honking which will give the gringa missionary, now stuck in her car somewhere behind your wreck, a headache and might make her pound on her steering wheel while shouting something like, “Let’s go, people! There are accidents on the road here ALL THE TIME - this is NOTHING new!! Come on now, GET MOVING!!” (Which, yes, is reeeally culturally insensitive.)

So, basically, I'm giving you super good advice. Especially if you don't want to cause a missionary, who is working hard to bear the spiritual fruit of patience, to stumble.

As you too well know, we often are struggling with figuring out our limits here. Many of you have offered loving advice on defining those limits. But, when you are out here, on the road, it's not that easy to say what is simply an issue of taking needed time off and what are things that God has asked for our obedience in going the extra mile. Take this week, for instance. It was a full week and I could have just said no to having an extra house guest for two nights. But, when you read River's guest book entry that says, "You're the first missionary I've ever met and definitely a positive Christan example... thanks for answering all my questions about your faith... and changing some of my paradigms," doesn't it seem that maybe God did want me to go that extra mile so River could catch a glimpse of His Son?

Learning our limits is a lot like learning to drive here. I think I've got the driving thing pretty much figured out, so I’m hopeful that we're on the right path in other choices about limits. I guess time will tell.

Now,...if I could only figure out which way is north...

(Thanks, Jamie!)