The other day, we took a journey to our kid’s school to hear our son’s book report.
It took a combination of 4 buses, and because of construction and holiday traffic, about 5 hours round trip. Traffic volume is a known problem here and this time of year is the worst it gets as people do their Christmas shopping. Going to the mall on Saturday is a bad idea. Did that.
I’m not complaining, but simply describing for our friends and supporters a picture of our life.
Near our house, a new interchange is being built as part of a highway project to facilitate traffic flow. Because of land locking, the only way to rebuild the interchange is up. This causes all sorts of traffic flow issues during construction, particularly when lanes have to be closed to move these beams or to put the supports in for the concrete forms.
The image here is the new set of bridges being built to elevate a highway around one of the local malls.
You can get a feel of the traffic around it in this picture.
The volume of traffic is heavy though these photos may not show it well. It moves at a snails pace as several lanes of traffic (I think 8) condense into 3 in front of the mall. There at the mall are hundreds of people daily being dropped off by taxis and getting on/off buses. Not a well designed intersection and thus the elevated highways being constructed.
We play Frogger when we cross the streets to walk to church or to the hardware store. Traffic moves slow enough that you simply take your life into your own hands, step into it and hope you don’t get hit. It’s like parting the Red Sea.
Most times traffic is a jammed as what you see in this photo from our big window:
Imagine this scene with impatient drivers, lots of horns blowing, and sometimes 3 lanes coming from the two side streets (from the bottom and the top).
The street from the top is a two way street, but often, impatient drivers will pull into the oncoming lane to rush up ahead of the line.
If someone turns off the main artery (from the right side of the picture) and there is a car there going the wrong way, no one moves anywhere and angry drivers blow their horn. This time of year, that road stays packed like that almost from 7am through 6pm at night. If the traffic light at the end of the main artery is not working it might take 30 minutes to an hour to move a few feet, as cops try to their best to faciliate traffic flow.
However, on Mother’s day and on 3 days weekends, the same interchange looks like this:
One can get around the city quite easily because a great number of people have gone to the interior to celebrate the three day weekend. This is the second 3 day weekend in a row. December has many holidays here.
Just a glimpse of our life. Continue to pray for us that we get a car so we too can get out of the city on weekends like this, and to faciliate our work here.
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