Car(e)less in the Community

As part of ‘care in the community’ we offer friendship succour and entertainment to assorted feral orphan boys and finding activities for them apart from eating or pilfering can be challenging.  With a very dirty car and an upcoming wedding what better than a Saturday car wash.  Remember that in this particular compound Saturday is Sunday and what traditionally do the British do on a Sunday, yes you have it- wash cars.  So with assorted boys in tow I set off with hose and rags to get Africa off the paint work.  All goes well and off comes the red dust with repeated hosing and it actually begins to look quite clean, boys being responsible and doing quite well.  Time for the inside, which is as dusty as the out so one boy in the boot, very dusty and one in the front to do the windows….big mistake as child seriously irresponsible.  While supervising the back and standing there I am suddenly while shouting ‘obscene instructions’ I am trying to stop the car rolling back, fat chance as I am knocked under the car and watch in horror as the petrol tank passes over my nose and the wheels pass perilously close and rocks scrape my back.  A loud crash, tinkling of glass and I come to a halt and am struck that there is blood all over my glasses, can not see a lot either.  As I pull myself from under the car to screaming Ethiopians and chaos (all in under 30 secs) I hear the young lad scream ‘it was not my fault’ to which I replied ‘yes it bloody was’ as I watched them scarper down he hill, hopefully including the wretched child in the back who must have watched in horror as he hurtled down the hill toward the wall.  I dread to think what might have happened if the wall, appropriately to the mortuary had not been there.  Anyway car (see photograph) in wall Ethiopians screaming and panicking and Karen walking up the hill with screaming cook and foster mother to Jabba.  I want to get the car sorted and ensure kid in back OK, apparently he is as Karen saw him run off.  So with Karen saying she will sort out car and with blood streaming from my head I avoid going to very grubby ER and head off to find my surgical colleague who will be watching Manchester United matches with my oppo, arrive point at head and arrange for him to suture it in clean OR facility. Meanwhile creaming Ethiopians metamorphose into silent hopping around vultures and I worry for the spare wheel tools etc. which finally get roughly piled into the car back seat, thereby destroying the cleaning to date.  A truly wonderful country Ethiopia. Hope to do this relatively peacefully but no chance as whole of maternity Worldwide, Hospital and any other hanger on turn up to look at my bleeding head and naked chest (glad I have lost some weight) and they have looked at my shoulders but miss the very large graze on my bum….(good).  So still alive (which I could easily not have been) as falling under the tyre might have produced a lot of crush I return home and change my shirt and apply pressure to still bleeding head.  As I believe is an Ethiopian tradition, the world arrives to express condolences, gawp and in one case tell me that the view in the local church is that it is a punishment for working on the Sabbath (He works in mysterious ways).  In amongst this the feral lads return together with their Adventist sponsor and bringing with them a wilting poinsettia probably plucked from our garden path en-route.  She explains that Matty, the culprit, was just goofing around, when he put the car into neutral and probably released the hand brake when he should have been washing windows, nearly killing me and his house mate so of course it was not his fault.

Lots of hand shaking and not seen them since, but it does raise some questions as to whose fault it was, if one wishes to apportion blame.  Youth fails test of growing up and behaving responsibly and does have to take some, perhaps though I doubt it he may learn from it, particularly as he will be being reassured by the Adventist connection that it isn’t and he sadly given his background would not recognise responsibility if it stared him in the face.  The soggy American view is I am sure that his little psyche must be protected…hmmm.  Perhaps I should not have let him near the car or told him on pain of summary expulsion and no more pop corn and films not to touch anything.  Perhaps we should have ensured bigger rocks.  Perhaps the advice we were given about not using the handbrake too much with the park facility as sand gets in the drum and wrecks things is not as good as it might be. So perhaps it is all my fault (bound to be it always is)for trying to give assorted street kids a purposeful and fun afternoon.  But it is only metal (granted expensive metal) and brick work and no one is seriously hurt.  We even dress and steri strip the youngster in the back of the car’s foot, given the inadequacy of the attempts by his current carer, the milk of human kindness indeed runeth over.  The view I tend to is ‘feckless irresponsible little shit wrecks car, nearly kills friend and me and has no idea what he has done’ and, sadly probably never will, it is unlikely that he will have learned anything from the experience other than he can get away with it.  The Ethiopian lesson, sadly which I have yet to learn, is trust no one!  That may not be entirely true, though the failure to give the car back in a driveable condition at the last service suggests that is as the car has now been driven to Addis by the nice hospital driver and is hopefully being beaten back into something like its original shape though I suspect that it will crab down the road now, and parts are difficult around here, not much chance of a new window let alone two bits of door, and lets not worry about the wheel carrier as that was crap in the first place and has already caused considerable metal fatigue.  So hopefully the all filler car will soon return to us but I doubt at the promised time , that measure is pretty elastic around here. When you see it in ‘Auto-trader’  move on down.  Will we continue ‘care in the community for the little lads, deprived, hungry and now homicidal…watch this space.

Bloody, battered but unbowed.