RIYADH, 21 October 2006 — Everyday after making Fajr prayer, schoolteacher Layla Al-Otaibi enters the bedroom of her young baby son, who is fast asleep. She caresses his hair, hugs him and then feeds him. Then she takes her school bag and prepares herself for the long and arduous journey to a school located 100 kilometers away from where she lives.
Layla is on the edge; daily she wonders whether she will return in the evening to her family.
“I do not know whether I will be able to go back home or not. Am I going to get to school in a car or arrive at a hospital in an ambulance? Everyday I say goodbye to my kids and my husband because it could be my very last,” Layla said to Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper.
The mental image of her dead colleagues that were killed in a painful traffic accident early this semester is as fresh as yesterday. The accident was covered in all major Saudi newspapers and the thought of what happened to them is in the minds of teachers at the school who continue to make the same trip down “the highway of death”.
Layla’s fears in going to school are reflected in recent statistics published by the Traffic Department. In the last three years, there have been 119 traffic accidents involving minivans carrying teachers to remote village schools; 140 teachers have died, with 86 of such teachers coming from the southern Asir region itself. Another 596 have been injured.
Badreya Hasan, an Arabic language teacher, said that she was seriously considering resigning from her teaching job. “I’ve been waiting for a long time to be transferred to a school nearby. My sister died in a traffic accident last year while returning home from a hard day at school,” said Badreya.
Statistics have revealed that most car accidents involving teachers occur in the Riyadh region with 17.5 percent of accidents happening there. Asir was second with 14.2 percent of accidents, followed by Makkah with 13.3 percent and Baha with 7.2 percent.
Capt. Ali Al-Rashidi, from Riyadh traffic police, attributes the reason behind the huge number of such accidents in Riyadh to the long distance teachers have to travel in the region. Al-Rashidi surveyed 561 female teachers and revealed that on an average a teacher travels 106 kilometers a day. The same study attributed the reason behind traffic accidents in Asir to the region’s difficult mountainous terrain.
Most accidents seem to occur because of drivers speeding. Blown tires was the second highest cause of accidents with 22.6 percent of accidents occurring because of that, while the carelessness of drivers were said to be behind 10 percent of the accidents. Vans constituted 43 percent of the types of cars involved in the accidents, followed by minibuses at 24 percent.
The study also showed that 56 percent of cars carrying teachers do not carry a safety inspection license, 20 percent of these cars are older than 10 years and 17 percent do not use tires that are suitable for the hot Saudi weather. Eighty percent of total accidents involve human error, according to the study.
