I’ve decided to stop driving to work.

Seriously.

It’s giving me grey hairs and minor heart-attacks.

In addition to the badly driven motorcycles/ bodabodas – I really want them banned from the streets- there are also the random police stops.

Between my house and the office there are two spots with an excess number of traffic police sitting around, idle, or pretending to direct traffic (resulting in traffic jams, usually)

They tend to ignore all the motorcyclists openly breaking every traffic rule, they ignore any cars with government or NGO plates or the better-looking/ newer cars- but they always, always always look at my Rav4, look at me (there aren’t too many S. Sudanese women with shoulder length dreads) and then  pull me over-by blowing their whistle- without fail.  

And then address me as a ‘wewe’ _which means they think I'm either Ugandan (ugh) or Kenyan.

 More often than not, for no valid reason.  

Instead, they ask for frivolous things like, ‘why don’t you have a fire extinguisher in your car?’

And then they proceed to ‘fine you’.

I have a traffic ticket that clearly says I should have paid 30SSP but the traffic cop was like, 40SSP- apparently the extra 10 was for her writing on the ticket, wtf). I got this on a day I was stopped 3 TIMES.

A friend of mine drives with the traffic act in her car, so that when they ask for such things, she pulls it out and starts asking them where in the traffic act does it state such a violation. She assures me that extinguishers are NOT mentioned. Personally if i did that i think they'd just haul me to the traffic police station.

Finally I just started ignoring the cops. I’d see them blow the whistle and motion for me to stop and I’d just continue on my merry way.

I’ve had to change routes to the office twice because of this – for fear that I will meet the same cops.

I'm now afraid that I’ll be thrown in jail for this, one of these days – they don't need a to do this.  

I ignore the cops because they are on their feet and i'm driving (and i figure, what are they gonna do, run after me?)

but.... apparently they sometimes will get on a motorcycle and give chase….

So I finally told the office…I just can't handle it. Bodaboda (motorcycle riders) and now the cops? 

Oh and I have to talk about the convoys/motorcades as well. Juba is really small but so far we have convoys for the president, the vice-president, the speaker of parliament, the governor, and godknowswho else. These drive at breakneck speed- why do they have to drive so fast??? they are driving less than 10-20 miles- usually no warning except you hear the siren and have to immediately pull over. I think all this is recipe for disaster. I've actually witnessed a really bad accident with one of these motorcades already

So.... another headache, for real