American Kids, Kyrgyz Kids, part two

I was going to write about this in the last post, but I forgot.  After dinner last night our friends gave us a ride home in their car.  In the US it would seat five people and if you suggested that any more could fit, you'd either get a lecture about seat belts or accused of endangering your children.  Here it fit all nine of us (four adults, two big kids, and three little kids) with no problem; in fact, suggesting that it wasn't safe would have been strange. 

I remember asking on a message board once if there were any good contraptions out there for some sort of restraint that could be used in a variety of vehicles from planes to trains to buses to cars that didn't rely on the car having a seat belt, and was also portable and inexpensive.  A few people who'd lived in places like this made suggestions (although there really isn't anything out there like that that I know of), but I got more of the lectures about NEVER putting a child in a car without proper restraint.  I hope those people always live in their well-ordered world because in most of the world, things don't work out quite so neatly.

(If our friends hadn't given us a ride we would have either taken a taxi, which certainly wouldn't have had seat belts, or a marshrutka which I imagine might frighten those well-ordered American families more than the 9-people-in-the-Camry option.)