international driver's license, what?

me and the truck have had a falling out.

let me give you a little background about this great blue wonder, which you can view in the picture below: it's got 270,000 miles-a sudanese mile includes thick, dusty roads with average potholes around 2 ft. deep and 5 ft. across. sometimes you have to drive between two 6ft piles of red clay while half a dozen people wander freely in and out of the alley way that the truck is barely fitting in. it has no rear-view mirror, no passenger side mirror, and no horn. oh, and first gear doesn't work anymore.

and let me just say that driving in khartoum is one of my top 10 most stressful situations: take 3 million drivers, 5 million people, donkey carts, and several herds of sheep, then tell them to all go in different directions as fast as they can on the worst city roads i've ever seen with no particular order.

then to add to this chaos, on my way home from some friends in bah'ri, about a 20 minute drive to the center (over one huge bridge and two interstates), the brakes went out. completely. i needed to make it back to the center to unlock the room with the boys' breakfast. so i did what any normal person would do, and i continued driving this giant missle of death with my sweaty hand on the e-brake and my panicked face out the window so i could yell at as many people as i could that this beast was not stopping. 250 bucks later, the truck is still the laughing stock of the neighborhood.

this is how i know God is real: i'm alive.