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Aug 25, 2010

Can I have that one in a white please?

“You can paint it any colour, so long as it's black”, Henri Ford apparently said. With that attitude Farah would have been one big Ford Co. bankruptcy waiting to happen: cars are white, everybody knows that. Cars are white and that’s the law of Corolla, Toyota Corolla. I am looking for a new car and driver, and is turning out to be a rather one-sided affair: imagine yourself at the paints counter in your local DIY-store with a colour-range consisting of 10 whites, the one just slightly dustier than the other.




In Kabul I always use taxis and in Herat I’m driven around in one of our armoured Landcruisers, but in Farah I thus far used the car of one of my staff, a white Toyota Corolla. Obviously. Unfortunately, more and more people in the district are starting to ask him why he is driving around with me next to him, something that is making him increasingly nervous. I understand his anxiety, but even if I do not use his car anymore he will still be working for my programme and thus qualify as an infidel in the eyes of some. Nevertheless, a new car and driver combo is needed.

Now, I have got two un-armoured (soft-skin) white Landcruisers, but just about anyone in a warzone knows that white Landcruisers are used by international organisations and should either be left in peace, hi-jacked or blown-up: you only drive in a white Landcruiser if it’s an armoured Landcruiser. But I don’t have one of those and no one is planning to give me one. Lesson: when driving around in un-armoured vehicles you have to blend in and drive the car everyone has: a white Toyota Corolla (product-placement or what?!). I still dream of my own Landrover Defender of even one of those huge American 4X4 trucks, but it’s all unadvisable (in other provinces it might be a different story).The Corolla also has to be at the least pre-2003 and dented.

In order to pretend that I have any control over my own life left, I have now come up with three simple wishes that nevertheless make my Corolla very special and much more expensive. I want a functioning air-conditioning (it’s 47 Celsius out here); a certain legal document that allows the car to go from district to district or pass the provincial border (seems handy), and: (tadaa) a license-plate. Hardly any cars currently have a license-plate and the last police clamp-down on unregistered cars ended in one death and a mass-demonstration, so I’ll just –in-case-that-you-never-know-and-such. Am I asking for too much? Apparently: the car has to come from another province.

Corolla dealt with! Now find myself a driver...can’t be difficult: he (she’s are not allowed) only has to speak English, Dari and Pashto; be from a family or tribe that has no quarrels or blood feuds anywhere in the province; have no criminal record; have no known ties with ‘certain’ groups, but has to know everyone; be lenient when it comes to prayer-times; I need to like him, and; he needs to be self-effacing / destructive enough to drive around an international. O yeah, and have a drivers license...pretty exotic.