Friday August 20, 1999

Our day began with us waking up to rain outside the bus. This was the first night all four of us slept inside the bus together. In the morning we went to David Gidden's house took showers and had coffee.

It was almost dark when we started on our way back from Toronto to the U.S. border. It was still raining and Carl started driving the bus. It’s rush hour traffic in Toronto and the bus squeals loudly every time we stop and start or turn around a corner. Finally we get on to the QEW highway. It’s not so much fun driving in the night, because there’s not much you can do on the bus. During the day, we can look out of the many windows in the bus to watch the changing (sometimes not so changing) landscape speed by. It’s generally hard to read or sleep or do any writing or typing because the bus jumps too much.

About an hour and a half later, somewhere in Ontario, Carl decides to pull over to a rest stop. We pass a McDonald’s, but the lane’s too tight to get the bus in. We then pull into a KFC. Mike opens the hood of the bus to check the radiator and I rush to the restroom. When I come out, I see a man carrying a big KFC bag talking to Mike. The hood of the bus is still open revealing the huge rusted insides of the engine.

"….it is a really old bus, I’m surprised it’s still running…I don’t think you’ll make it to Washington…" he says looking at the license plate. Mike starts explaining that we’re going to Buffalo. This man has a different accent and I can’t entirely identify it. They start looking into the engine. Apparently a lot of water and antifreeze had leaked out from the radiator when we stopped the bus, so there still seems to be some problem with overheating. The KFC delivery man pokes around a little bit explaining all the different part of the engine— he seems really interested in the engine and seems to know a lot about cars. "That’s what your problem is," he says, moving the fan behind the radiator, "you should not be able to move this fan, the belt is too loose"

Auto mechanics lesson # 4

He begins explaining how it’s really important that the belt be tight. When the engine starts running, the crankshaft is spinning which turns the belt, which in turn turns the water pump, the fan and the alternator. The fan and the water pump are working to cool the engine and the alternator produces electricity to charge the batteries and other electrical systems in the bus. When the fan belt is loose, the crank shaft slips against the belt and makes a squealing sound. ( This was the squealing sound we’d been hearing all this time) If the crank shaft is slipping then the belt is not turning properly and as a result there are problems with cooling and charging. The solution, he says, is to tighten the belt.

He offers to help us tighten the belt if we can wait 45 minutes till 11 pm, when his shift at KFC got over. If not, he’d lend us his tools and we could do it ourselves, and when we finish we should come to the KFC counter and ask for Sam. If we don’t want to fix it, he recommends that we drive slowly all the way to Buffalo. We all look at each other wondering what to do. Carl says, we have to drive for only one and a half hours to reach Buffalo, and we’ve already made it this far… Mike says, if we don’t do it now we’ll have to take the bus to a mechanic in Buffalo tommorow…. Dorothea says we just might make things worse and get stranded…. I’m getting a bit nervous about crossing the U.S. border with this bus and just want to be on our way and get it over with…. In the end we decide to wait for Sam and for his KFC shift to get over.

Sam comes out in 10 minutes and says, "let’s do it!" Dorothea begins to videotape. We bring him a flashlight and an aluminium pole to hold up the alternator. He gets under the bus and in about five minutes he tightens it. "Now the bus won’t squeal, it won’t overheat and even your lights will get brighter" We offer him money, but he refuses to take any. I cannot believe what a nice person he is. We then give him a termite T-shirt and tell him about Termite TV and our road trip. He seems very interested. We tell him that we’re recording people’s life stories in five minutes, would he like us to tape his life story? "No, no," he says, ‘I don’t really have a life story, you see, I’m an immigrant from Sudan." He immigrated to Canada many years ago as a political refugee. His real name is Hisham. He tells us a story that took place about a year ago, just when the U.S. had bombed Sudan. He was trying to go to the U.S. to visit his relatives in New Jersey and was stopped at the border. "I’ve never been so humiliated in my life," he says. Apparently, the Immigration officials accused him of being a terrorist from Sudan, they put him in jail for 5 hours and threatened to imprison him for 10 years, if he didn’t tell them what they needed to know. "I’ve been to the U.S. many times before, I said look, here’s a picture of me at the Empire State building, if I wanted to bomb the place, I could have done it then." He could not get a logical answer or explanation from anyone. After contacting the Canadian government who verified that he was a Canadian citizen, they made him sign some forms and said that he would not be able to visit the United States for 20 years. He was then escorted across the bridge back to Canada.

He then tells us another story. A few years ago, he and his wife (a white Canadian) were visiting the U.S and stopped at the border. The immigration officer asks Hisham for his identification and papers, they do not ask his wife for any identification. Just as they are about to leave, they see her hands. His wife loves henna, says Hisham, and her hands are adorned with henna patterns. The officer asks "What did he do to you!"

What an intense conversation, and how ironic that this was a life story we weren’t able to capture on tape. We didn’t have a contact address for him, so I look around to quickly see the name of the area we’re in — there should be some way to get in touch with him later. I see a sign, Fairhill Mall. Maybe some other time, we can do a video with him, I think, maybe he’ll still be working as a delivery man for KFC, though for his sake I hope maybe not.

Listening to Hisham’s stories, made me think of my own border crossing experience in San Diego, where we were pulled over because the immigration officials thought I was Mexican. It’s terrible to be made to feel like a criminal for no other reason than the colour of your skin, or the way you pronounce a word.

What the U.S. really needs to do, I say, is to get immigration officers from more diverse backgrounds. Then they won’t have to rely on stereotypes, says Dorothea, it’s really fucked up.

Dorothea takes the cell phone and starts talking into it, "Yes, we’re just approaching the border and we have the cocaine shipment, what you want a 100 illegal immigrants? no, no, I said 98." She says that we should make a show called "phone calls that we never made."