By: L.A. Kohl
February 17, 2005
(Published in the Wed., Mar 9 2005 edition of the "Bull's Eye", Vol. 1, #20)
The guys with the map, in the back seat of the taxi, finally figured out what the nearest town was...Muzaffarnagar. When they called to let us know, the information was not met with enthusiasm. Shaloam, an EMI staff person who was a native Indian, said that of all the cities he’d ever been to in India, Muzaffarnagar was the worst – the one he’d never want to be stranded in, especially after dark. Not what we all wanted to hear, especially the Americans in a hi-jacked taxi. But the next few series of events were just affirmation of my belief that worrying really is a waste of time.
It “just so happened” that there was a friend, Oopie, visiting Shaloam that night. After explaining the situation to Oopie, he mentioned that he knew a pastor in Muzaffarnagar. We quickly told the guys on the phone – who were hoping for some kind of advice on what to do – to call back when they got to Muzaffarnagar and hopefully we could give them a phone number for a pastor there. Shaloam began pulling out phone directories.
Meanwhile, Nate, Tim and Shawn were getting closer to Muzaffarnagar, and the taxi driver had fallen into a drugged sleep. They began debating what to do. Should they just leave him and his taxi, and go find other transportation? But what if the guy killed himself or someone else when he took over the wheel again? Maybe they should take him to the local police? But they were the ones who had hi-jacked a taxi, and depending on the perspective of the police, the guys could easily wind up in jail over such a thing. They decided to just pull over as soon as they got to Muzaffarnagar, and see what God might do.
A lone man “happened” to be walking along the road when they pulled off. There was little chance that he could understand or help them with their problem, but they decided to try anyway. As providence would have it, the man not only spoke English, but spoke it fluently. After hearing their story, he became irate – not at the Americans, but at the taxi driver, who was standing there dazed. He chewed the taxi driver out in Hindi, and then for the benefit of the guys, translated what he had just said into English! This man then insisted that Nate follow him to the police station, with the taxi driver, and let the police handle it. While Tim and Shawn called us to get the pastor’s phone number – my husband hesitantly followed this man to the police station. Alas, the policeman on duty spoke no English, and the taxi driver began to quickly plead his case. But the local had stuck around, and came to Nate’s defense. In the end, the pastor showed up and the policeman took the taxi driver’s keys. Probably had the guy sleep it off in jail – like Otis in the Andy Griffith show!
The pastor was very gracious. He not only allowed Nate, Shawn and Tim to sleep at his home that night, but also had his personal bodyguard drive them back to Mussoorie the next morning. (You see what kind of city it was, when a pastor has his own bodyguard!)
All’s well that ends well, I suppose – but it made for a few tense hours, and lots of laughs over the following days. During our two month stay, it was hands down the most frightening “view” from our Mussoorie front porch.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
The Great Taxi Hi-Jack, Part II
By: L.A. Kohl
Jan. 13, 2005
(published in the Wed., Mar 2 edition of the "Bull's Eye", Vol. 1, #19) One of our interns liked to say that India was the land where adventure FOUND you. If you remember from last week’s article, it had just found my husband big time.
The road their taxi was traveling on was a fairly typical Indian “highway”. Please don’t picture the new, four lane Hwy. 63 when I use the word highway. Think more of old Hwy. 63. The really old one, the one that only pieces and sections of now exist. The one with huge cracks and potholes, that lies mostly west of new Hwy. 63. Now, picture a highway similar to that, with huge diesel buses barreling along at 60 MPH, various taxis and minivans with blaring horns, bullock carts lumbering along at 2 MPH, pedestrians, rickety bicycles, rickshaws...maybe even an occasional work elephant. Of course all those later highway travelers have no lights, and it was now dark. And here we have three Americans in a taxi that wants to try driving on the wrong side of the road, and driving backwards. Driving in India is dangerous when you do it correctly...so what this taxi driver was doing was life-threatening. Tim, a twenty-something year old, later said that it was the scariest thing he’d ever experienced, and Tim travels places like Pakistan with nothing but his backpack and a “Lonely Planet” guidebook. Now maybe you can begin to grasp the severity of the situation a little more.
But how do you get a taxi from its spacey, Hindi speaking driver? They decided they had to convince him they were extremely displeased with his service, and they were going to find some other way home (problem was, they were in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, with possible criminals following close behind hoping to plunder them...not really any other options.) Once they got him off the road, they wanted him to open the trunk so they could get out their gear. When the driver put his keys in the trunk and opened it, Nate carefully reached up and snatched the keys out of the lid, while Tim and Shawn distracted the guy. So now all of a sudden they decided maybe they didn’t want to get their bags out after all...maybe they’d keep going. The confused driver shut the lid, and reached for his keys, only to find them gone. He started crawling around in the dark looking for them, while the three Americans hopped back in the taxi, with Nate in the driver’s seat and with the keys.
Ooo, was that guy ticked when he realized what had happened. He got in the passenger side slurring lots of choice Hindi words, and physically trying to get the keys back while Nate’s trying to get started down the road. It was not an easy task, as I’ve already mentioned the road conditions. On top of that he’s trying to see thru a crackly looking windshield, driving on the wrong side of the road for an American, and he’s got a delirious taxi driver kicking and swearing at him. The guys in the back were trying to help, but they were also trying to read a map and figure out where in the world they were, and where in the world they were trying to go, and trying to call us to figure out what we thought they should do...guess we’ll find out next week!
Jan. 13, 2005
(published in the Wed., Mar 2 edition of the "Bull's Eye", Vol. 1, #19) One of our interns liked to say that India was the land where adventure FOUND you. If you remember from last week’s article, it had just found my husband big time.
The road their taxi was traveling on was a fairly typical Indian “highway”. Please don’t picture the new, four lane Hwy. 63 when I use the word highway. Think more of old Hwy. 63. The really old one, the one that only pieces and sections of now exist. The one with huge cracks and potholes, that lies mostly west of new Hwy. 63. Now, picture a highway similar to that, with huge diesel buses barreling along at 60 MPH, various taxis and minivans with blaring horns, bullock carts lumbering along at 2 MPH, pedestrians, rickety bicycles, rickshaws...maybe even an occasional work elephant. Of course all those later highway travelers have no lights, and it was now dark. And here we have three Americans in a taxi that wants to try driving on the wrong side of the road, and driving backwards. Driving in India is dangerous when you do it correctly...so what this taxi driver was doing was life-threatening. Tim, a twenty-something year old, later said that it was the scariest thing he’d ever experienced, and Tim travels places like Pakistan with nothing but his backpack and a “Lonely Planet” guidebook. Now maybe you can begin to grasp the severity of the situation a little more.
But how do you get a taxi from its spacey, Hindi speaking driver? They decided they had to convince him they were extremely displeased with his service, and they were going to find some other way home (problem was, they were in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, with possible criminals following close behind hoping to plunder them...not really any other options.) Once they got him off the road, they wanted him to open the trunk so they could get out their gear. When the driver put his keys in the trunk and opened it, Nate carefully reached up and snatched the keys out of the lid, while Tim and Shawn distracted the guy. So now all of a sudden they decided maybe they didn’t want to get their bags out after all...maybe they’d keep going. The confused driver shut the lid, and reached for his keys, only to find them gone. He started crawling around in the dark looking for them, while the three Americans hopped back in the taxi, with Nate in the driver’s seat and with the keys.
Ooo, was that guy ticked when he realized what had happened. He got in the passenger side slurring lots of choice Hindi words, and physically trying to get the keys back while Nate’s trying to get started down the road. It was not an easy task, as I’ve already mentioned the road conditions. On top of that he’s trying to see thru a crackly looking windshield, driving on the wrong side of the road for an American, and he’s got a delirious taxi driver kicking and swearing at him. The guys in the back were trying to help, but they were also trying to read a map and figure out where in the world they were, and where in the world they were trying to go, and trying to call us to figure out what we thought they should do...guess we’ll find out next week!
Thursday, February 24, 2005
The Great Taxi Hi-jack, Prt. 1
(printed in the Northern Boone County Bull's Eye, Vol. 1, No. 18, Wednesday Feb. 23, '05))
I realize this is The View from the Front Porch column. Usually it’s a “step back from the fast pace of life” kind of column. But our family temporarily had a different front porch about four years ago, and I thought perhaps you’d enjoy a view from that porch occasionally.
It literally had a view of the Himalayas...talk about peaceful. But it was in India – so we sometimes moved from peaceful right on into adventure.
It was 2001, and our entire family (seven of us total at the time) was in Mussoorie, India, working with Engineering Ministries, International (EMI). Now just being in India was plenty of adventure for me – a woman who had never even flown in an airplane until two months before we left for India.
Nate had committed to overseeing EMI’s India office for a nine week period. He had a group of six interns that he was responsible for overseeing their design work for various ministry projects that EMI had going on throughout the country. Twice, this required him to leave Mussoorie for days at a time to go do some surveying at a job site. Thus began an adventure within the adventure...
Nate had been down to Hyderabad (about 2 days travel distance from Mussoorie) with two of the interns, Tim and Shawn, for several days. They were returning, and had made it as far as Delhi by train without incident. When they arrived in Delhi, they discovered the train they wanted would not be leaving for several hours. Their brilliant minds deduced that hiring a taxi to take them to Mussoorie (maybe an 8-10 hour drive from Delhi, although only a couple hundred miles away) would be quicker than waiting all day to catch a train and then riding it for several hours. They had the only EMI cell phone along with them, so they called to let us know their plan, and to say they should arrive sometime before midnight.
The next time we heard from them was that evening. It seems their taxi driver was driving insanely. They claimed he was fine for the first couple of hours, but after they made a quick pit stop, he had been getting worse and worse. He spoke little English anyway, but he was even more unintelligible now, with very slurred and slow speech. He would keep driving slower and slower, weaving all over the road and driving on the wrong side of the road (which is the right side over there.) At one point he had stopped in the middle of the road and put it in reverse for awhile. Nate, Tim and Shawn were wondering if when they made that pit stop, someone “slipped” the taxi driver some drugs, in order to make him wreck, so they could follow up on the crash scene and plunder the “westerners” – not an unheard of occurrence over there. They were calling to ask us to pray, and to see if we had any last words of advice before they resorted to the desperate measure of taxi hi-jacking. Words of advice on hi-jacking a taxi? Sorry, we were all rather inexperienced in such matters. But the adventure will have to continue next week...
I realize this is The View from the Front Porch column. Usually it’s a “step back from the fast pace of life” kind of column. But our family temporarily had a different front porch about four years ago, and I thought perhaps you’d enjoy a view from that porch occasionally.
It literally had a view of the Himalayas...talk about peaceful. But it was in India – so we sometimes moved from peaceful right on into adventure.
It was 2001, and our entire family (seven of us total at the time) was in Mussoorie, India, working with Engineering Ministries, International (EMI). Now just being in India was plenty of adventure for me – a woman who had never even flown in an airplane until two months before we left for India.
Nate had committed to overseeing EMI’s India office for a nine week period. He had a group of six interns that he was responsible for overseeing their design work for various ministry projects that EMI had going on throughout the country. Twice, this required him to leave Mussoorie for days at a time to go do some surveying at a job site. Thus began an adventure within the adventure...
Nate had been down to Hyderabad (about 2 days travel distance from Mussoorie) with two of the interns, Tim and Shawn, for several days. They were returning, and had made it as far as Delhi by train without incident. When they arrived in Delhi, they discovered the train they wanted would not be leaving for several hours. Their brilliant minds deduced that hiring a taxi to take them to Mussoorie (maybe an 8-10 hour drive from Delhi, although only a couple hundred miles away) would be quicker than waiting all day to catch a train and then riding it for several hours. They had the only EMI cell phone along with them, so they called to let us know their plan, and to say they should arrive sometime before midnight.
The next time we heard from them was that evening. It seems their taxi driver was driving insanely. They claimed he was fine for the first couple of hours, but after they made a quick pit stop, he had been getting worse and worse. He spoke little English anyway, but he was even more unintelligible now, with very slurred and slow speech. He would keep driving slower and slower, weaving all over the road and driving on the wrong side of the road (which is the right side over there.) At one point he had stopped in the middle of the road and put it in reverse for awhile. Nate, Tim and Shawn were wondering if when they made that pit stop, someone “slipped” the taxi driver some drugs, in order to make him wreck, so they could follow up on the crash scene and plunder the “westerners” – not an unheard of occurrence over there. They were calling to ask us to pray, and to see if we had any last words of advice before they resorted to the desperate measure of taxi hi-jacking. Words of advice on hi-jacking a taxi? Sorry, we were all rather inexperienced in such matters. But the adventure will have to continue next week...
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