This past weekend we drove our team into Manzini for a “communication day” so they could use the internet. It is about an hour and a half drive down just one main road. On the way back to Nsoko I was driving a van with around 8 of our girls. We were only about 20 minutes from home when we drove past a police checkpoint. An officer had waved for me to stop to the side and I assumed he was just going to ask where we were going or whatever and send us on our way. It didn’t seem odd to me that he made us stop and I had no idea anything would have been wrong.
The police officer came over to my window and asked to see my driver’s license. At that point I knew I must have done something wrong and automatically assumed I was speeding (which I usually never do…). Luckily I had my license on me and grabbed it from my bag and walked it over to him on the other side of the road. Anyways, he soon informed me that I was “overtaking on a solid line”, aka I had illegally passed a slower car. Now, I have been driving here for the past two weeks and had no idea they had laws about passing. Every car on the road seemed to pass whenever they felt like it and I decided to just follow that example. I tried extremely hard to play the ditzy card and explained that I had no idea that there was a law about passing and that I have only been driving in Swazi for a short time (and I might have even said that we don’t have laws like that where I am from…woops). He was giving me no sympathy and was trying to tell me that illegally passing a car is a very big offense in Swazi, “a very big offense”.
So here I am, on the side of the road in Swaziland, with a group of my girls across the street staring at me with a policeman. He wasn’t offering much information so I asked him what the next step was. He then informed me that I would need to go to court. Court, seriously? I told him that there is no way I would be able to make it to court. He said I would need to go the next morning to a town that is about 45 minutes away from us. I asked him if there was another option because there is no way I could do that and he said that I could then just “fly away” (and he included hand motions of ascending into the sky). I could tell this conversation wasn’t going anywhere helpful so I asked if there was a fine I could pay right then. He then involved the other officer who was on the opposite side of their car.
Now I found m
yself talking to a policewoman who was essentially giving me the information I already knew, that I would need to go to court. When I informed her that there was no way I was going to do that, she pulled out her Swazi traffic rules book to prove to me that what I had done was illegal. I had to explain to her that I in no way doubted that what I did was wrong, but that we would need to come up with another solution of how to take care of this (I had no idea trying to bribe Swazi police officers would be so hard). She then made a quick phone call and told me it would be a 60 rand fine (less than $10). Hello! That is much easier then court. So, I ran back across the street to the van and quickly got the money while she wrote out my ticket (which by the way she wrote my name down as Pamela Jean, my first and middle name, and in no way included my last name). I then handed her the money, took back my license, and got back on the road.
