Friday, 21 September 2007

Isn't she lovely?




Stealing from Stevie Wonder aside, isn't she? Meet Saabine, named after Sabine Schmidt, the German racing driver who made a mockery of Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear by almost beating his Nurburgring lap time in a Transit van (Because of this she's in some ways an ideal woman - a racing driver, gutsy, but not butch or laddish)! Yes, Saabine does include an extra 'a' to denote the fact that she is indeed a Saab 900SE 2.0 turbo (Yes, a turbo! :oD So like Sabine, Saabine is very, very quick!). I picked her up for the paultry sum of R35,000, which is about £2400, and in SA used car terms that is about as cheap as they come while still having four wheels! You would not believe the junk that I saw available for R35,000 - rust, bits missing, ancient, etc. So to get Saabine is a massive blessing. There are a few factors that have worked in my favour though.

The first one is that even though petrol is about half the price of the UK here, it's been going up recently and for local people it's actually considered quite expensive. So on the whole big cars with big engines don't have a lot of resale value - especially at the cheap end of the market where people are quite money conscious. So much is this so that when I saw the R40,000 asking price and suggested something more like R35,000 the dealer basically just agreed. Given the hilly terrain here and the fact that petrol is still cheap to me, I think a car like Saabine serves me a lot better than a tiny runabout that costs the same amount to buy and is in worse condition.

Secondly, big cars come with bigger servicing and repair costs, which people at my end of the market want to avoid. I did have to think quite hard about this one because anything seriously wrong with the car could be seriously expensive. At the same time, lots of things wrong with a cheaper car would ultimately cost me too. Saabine seems to be almost faultless, and even has a full service history, so for 10 months I should be able to (with the big executive car reliability) avoid any serious repairs. Any problems that do occur should be manageable too as labour charges are a lot less here than the UK, so a Saab dealer service might well end up cheaper than an independent service in the UK.

Thirdly, and most importantly, God has blessed me big time with this. I saw a few similar cars for similar money that were riddled with faults. I've seen other cars for similar money in terrible condition. I've seen a few half decent ones but with no air conditioning, and given that it's at times necessary now, come December-February (our summer) I would die without it! Having looked at a world map we're on an equivalent latitude to Cairo, Egypt, so think that sort of thing when you think how hot it gets. So I'm very thankful to God that He's given me a good car, that won't cause me too much hassle (I don't think), that will stop me passing out in the heat, and that will let me serve other people with lifts and moving things (essential in a church plant!) etc.

A car is also more than a convenience here. It's 13km (over 8 miles) from where I live to the church (though the roads are usually fairly good, which makes these sorts of journeys quite common), so there's no question of walking. Public transport doesn't even really exist where I am, as it's a more wealthy area in which everyone has cars. Even if it did, public transport is risky and very unreliable and generally only goes into the centre of town. It's not uncommon to see people walking the final leg, or even the whole, of their journeys, with many of them walking along motorways as an everyday occurance! There are many things like that that people do out of necessity which are just so unsafe. It's one of the things I will write about soon, but racial inequality is still something of a fact of life. While I've not seen too much overt discrimination, the fact is that virtually all the very poor people are black, there's a reasonable sized middle class that's quite mixed, and the wealthy are predominantly white (though a few black people have become exceedingly rich since the end of apartheid - much to the complaint of other black people who remained poor). That means the assumption is that if you're white you have a reasonable amount of money (which in this case is again true). So should I decide to get a bus, I'm instantly an advert saying, "I'm the best target to be robbed and I probably don't even know where I am." What I want to write about later is how this becomes a bit of a viscious circle - that no white people travel on public transport because they're a target, hence any that do will always be a target, hence they won't travel on the bus, and things stay the same. Changing social norms, especially where rich and poor are involved, is something that takes a long time or at least a violent change (e.g. Russian Revolution).

Anyway, I have a good tool to help me with some of the realities of Durban life. I intend to find ways to make sure I don't sink into the very common isolationist lifestyle that a good car and a secure home in a nice part of town means its so easy to do.




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