The New Year's Curse

New Year’s Eve, circa 1989, would see our family at the monstrous home of the Doanes, family friends who had children our age, a wealth of snacks and a love of board games. One year we watched the Gremlins, ate ourselves nearly sick on snacks scooped up in a paper napkin and set down the dice only when Dick Clark demanded we pick up a glass of something else. New Year’s then was a lot less pressure than it’s become now; more about friends, family and neighbourliness than splashy displays of good cheer.

From a single girl’s perspective, the intense pressure to do something spectacular to bring in the new year makes it worse than Valentine’s day. At least on Valentine’s day there’s a prescribed role for single girls: they’re expected to be miserable in their aloneness, to rail loudly in a post-feminist sort of way about the tyranny of coupledom, the corporate take over of love and romance, to shout in a desperate seeming way about the relative merits of being single.

But New Years Eve is seen more as a bellwether holiday, as though the way the evening progresses cements a pattern for the year and if you were alone knocking back a thimbleful of champagne, or found yourself amongst drunken strangers without someone to kiss meaningfully at midnight, then every other night of the 365 that remain will go exactly the same way.

I have mostly avoided the holiday by working, finding myself freezing in Nathan Philips Square or taking copy from the “warmth” of the newsroom. My best New Year’s to date, ironically, was the night of the Millennium, which started out at the Toronto Hydro offices and carried on to the splashy but poorly attended Star party. Around 2 a.m., after smoking clove cigarettes and talking about nothing, a group of us stole a giant Toronto Star cake and hauled it uptown in a taxi to Renata’s place, where we drank, ate cake and swung on the swings at the park next door until the sun came up.

My worst, hands down, was the year a group of us got rather expensive tickets to a big, faceless party at the convention centre in Hull. We promptly got separated, then spent the rest of the night trying to get the group all re-assembled. When the countdown began mercifully at midnight, we smashed our plastic glasses full of something like champagne with vehemence worthy of the night’s frustrations, shouted “Vive le difference!” and headed straight for the door.

This New Year, Emily and I were in Stone Town, Zanzibar and the evening started ominously enough: on our way to dinner at the waterfront we watched a man on a scooter get mowed down by a car pulling out of a parking lot.

It’s actually amazing that I have lived here this long and not seen a road-related fatality, given how insane the driving is and how poor the road conditions are. I guess I repressed how grueling the travel here can be. Take a routine trip to the refugee camp in Ghana: first the tro-tro to Circle, then fight your way across to the “O’Donna” part, find the Kaneshie bus, listen to the loud-mouth moron shout in Twi as he sells his bright orange “vitamins” on the bus, then get down and fight your way through the market at Kaneshie to where the van should be waiting for the ride to Buduburam.

Wait in the mud for the van. Fend off water, biscuit, PK and FanYogo sellers. Get on bus, valiantly guard arm and leg space as though life depended on it. Shoot ugly looks at two Liberians who are obviously traveling together but chose not to sit together and are now speaking at decibel 45,000 about their devotion to Christ across all other passengers. (Liberians have this way of speaking, their accent is like a more ignorant-sounding version of the Alabama drawl and they have a tendency to drop the last syllable of virtually every word and they often talk as though they are only allotted 13 seconds and they’ve got to fit it all in.) Sigh, often, at the state of traffic. Repeat until arrive at destination.

In an unparalleled stroke of urban planning genius, someone in a cushy office at some ministry in Ghana decided to spend Japanese aid money on upgrading the three roads that lead out of Accra. All at the same time.

Ostensibly, this has something to do with forming a trade alliance with the other English-speaking countries of West Africa and the final product will not only see them upping their imports and exports, but sharing a common currency known as the Eco. The deadline for introducing this new currency has long passed; the billboards announcing it have all been replaced by hair-care and skin-bleaching products.

But the road upgrade continues. When Rhonda and I traveled together a year ago, the road out west, to Cape Coast and beyond, moved at a snail’s pace. Frankly, all the roads out of Accra move at a snails pace. Actually, that would be an insult to the snail. He can move faster than that. Today it’s no different. It’s mind-boggling: at one point in the trip to Buduburam, we were driving four abroad on the shoulder of the road while next to us unraveled two perfectly flat, gorgeously paved strips of highway. When we got a chance to get on it, we did, driving on the right strip at some points and on the left strip at others. Sometimes the cars, trucks, tro-tros, vans and bikes would just swerve all over the place, as if they were a bunch of drunken greyhounds fighting for the top spot in the pack. Everything was a legitimate driving surface so long as it was within the boundaries of the deep ditches. Of course, at one point, we just nosed down over the ridge leading to the ditch and drove down there for a while. It was insane, really. We were stopped for ages: it took nearly three hours from the time I left my door to the time I emerged from the tro-tro out into the brilliant sun of the refugee camp, which is probably less than 40 km away.

Mom and Dad, having survived the “road” north in Kenya, can attest to the uniqueness of African highways.

Anyway, this time, the scooter driver swerved defensively, but still managed to slam into the driver-side (passenger side at home) and go skidding, careering and finally bouncing to a stop on the pavement. One tire was ripped to shreds. Everything that could shatter did: lights, mirrors, windscreens. The bike was in two pieces. The poor guy, thankfully wearing a helmet, lay face-down on the pavement. He looked up, then fell back again. He tried several times to get up. Emily and I started to approach and so did a half dozen other men, appearing out of nowhere in the night. No one seemed to know what to do, although the driver managed to get himself up and off the road, in a gingerly way that made me think he’d broken at least his wrist. Emily asked the obvious question, what should we do? Call the police? The police, however, were already there, standing on the other side of the road with assault rifles slung over their shoulders. They were the other drivers. They were driving their car out of the police parking lot without the headlights on and hit the scooter.

I’ve often wondered what I would do when faced with a car accident in Africa and it’s stunning that I haven’t had to face it before this. Turns out I would do nothing. Neither of us speak Swahili well enough to find out what’s wrong medically, and even if we did, there’s little we could do about it, other than offer money for a hospital. Because the cops were involved, no one seemed to know how to respond. (They stood on the opposite side of the road and just watched the man.) We’re women in a Muslim culture and were unsure how the man would respond if we went rushing in, touching him and speaking in a language he might not understand. In the end, we simply walked away.

Happy New Year indeed.