The Car Game

So seeing as I now have been driving for a while I wanted to account for all the mishaps to my van so far. I thought it would be fun to play a game of who has inflicted more damage to the van. Obviously I'm contestant #1 and if you hadn't already guessed, Pastor Dongo is contestant #2. Well, let's get this game underway...First I need to explain the scoring. Any mishap resulting in no visible damage to the car is worth 1 point whereas visible damage can score anywhere from 5 - 10 points depending on severity.

So when I received the car, I took my first trip to Pastor Dongo's house. Actually, I took Glory for ice cream for his birthday and were driving them back to the house. Let's just say the road to the house wasn't the most "van-friendly". I had been there before in Dongo's car as a passenger without any problems so I thought...no problem, it should be a breeze. The first part was easy, but then...as we got closer to the top of the hill....BANG...bottomed out once...BANG... and again...BANG...I was a little embarassed it being within my first few driving adventures in Uganda. Score - Darren 3, Dongo 0

Second day of having the car, I had to drive to pick up a visitor at the local hotel. She was going home later that day so I needed to pick her up and all of her luggage and get her to the school so she could meet one of the kids her friend sponsors. I got up the hill fine, but as I turned to go down the hill, they had been working on the road. There were some rocks there to block off part of the road that they were working on grading. And on the other side was a man walking. I thought that I had plenty of room on the side with the rocks and obviously didn't want to hit the man. I ran over one of the rocks and.....PPPSSSSSTTTTTT (actually it didn't that long, but was pretty quick)...blew the left front tire. Luckily I was almost at the hotel and was able to roll in and park there. Oh and by the way...found out that not all the things we needed to jack the car up and release the spare tire underneath were present...joy of buying a used car in Uganda. Fortunately for me, we were planning to buy new tires anyway as three of them were one size and one was a different size! Score - Darren 8, Dongo 0 (I would have given more points if we weren't planning to buy new tires!)

A few days later, Pastor Dongo and I had to drive to his village to take pictures of kids that were sponsored there. He asked if I wanted to drive, but I told him he could drive my car. We were cruising around when a big truck came the other way and spit up a rock or something toward us. I watched as I saw this object in slow motion approaching the windshield. Then...CRACK. No big deal...but wait now there's a crack in the windshield. not just one of those pebble sized cracks, but one of those with cracks moving outward, although they were less than 1 in long each. Score - Darren 8, Dongo 6

When the visitors came in from the US, we went to the bush every day with Pastor driving the van. On the first day, we had just reached town and were going on a roundabout when all of us felt something bang and push the back of the van. We looked out the back to see a taxi driver looking at our van yet continuing on his route to a different exit of the roundabout. Pastor didn't even flinch. We thought that he just ignored it and didn't think it was a big deal...later we come to find out that he didn't even know that someone had hit the car. Score - Dongo 13, Darren 8

On that same drive to the bush, we ran into some of the worst conditions for road that I had seen. Pastor was doing a good job of manuevering around the large valleys caused by rain, but then KABONG. followed by a screeeeeeeeeeccccccccccc. One of the visitors said "the tire came off" I about pooped in my pants trying to figure out how that happened. You guessed it, the spare tire came out and the thing that held the tire there was dragging on the ground. After some time and what we thought was some MacGyver intervention by Pastor Howard, We got the tire and place and were on our way...until we bottomed out again and the tire came loose again. We decided to put the tire in the van and fix it when we got to the bush! Score Dongo 23, Darren 8...here's where I'm being kind with scoring because I think it got fixed in the bush only to happen again on the way back to Kampala.

Well, I'm no going to say I'm a better driver than Dongo, but let's just say one of our visitors enjoyed being in my car when I was driving rather than Pastor! Let the score speak for itself. If anyone thinks my scoring is unfair or biased in any way please comment and I'll make adjustments accordingly.