Medicine For Your Windshield

Unabridged version originally distributed October 2010

I’m not creative enough to make these things up. I get my inspiration from other people. Did you know there was medicine for your windshield? Well there isn’t, but when I took my car to a repair shop in Manzini the guy was explaining the process of treating a crack in my windshield from a flying stone so that it wouldn’t spread. When he got to the part about injecting resin into the glass he was calling it medicine. Ok, if that’s how you see it. Just as long as it makes my windshield “all better,” use whatever medicine you want.

I haven’t just been pelted by rocks lately, it’s been a steady onslaught of things, mostly expenses – work permit fees, car title change fees... So when this rock hit my windshield it was just one more thing I really didn’t need.

During an otherwise uneventful drive on a tar road, the rock came flying at my windshield and left a nice starburst right in the middle. Awesome. And what am I going to do about that? Luckily a Swazi friend told me about a place in Manzini where I could get it fixed. But I’m not in Manzini all the time and I’ve had lots of things to do before I got to this little issue so the crack was starting to spread and then I was having nightmares about having a huge crack across the windshield and having to replace the whole thing. So I went to a place in Mbabane (the capital and about 35 miles from Manzini), because I was already there. They wanted to charge E220. Aaa! Are you kidding?! That’s about $35, which you might think is not a big deal, but it is for me at this stage. So I called my Swazi friend again. He allayed my fears that it wasn’t going to just crack all at once so I’d have time to check in Manzini. Sigh, ok.

So I spent the next week or two getting the title on my car changed and managed to negotiate the associated costs down from E800 to E100. Hurray! After that triumph, I went to Manzini and got the medicine put in my windshield for E150 instead of the E220 they wanted to charge in Mbabane. Whew! Another E70 saved.