The first thing driver Sacha Ristet does upon entering his bus is raise the partition that separates him from his passengers. Ristet works in Seine-Saint-Denis, a depressed region north of Paris that was the epicenter of three weeks of fiery riots that shook France last year. More recently, a spate of bus burnings by disaffected youths have plagued the area — home to many Muslim immigrants from France’s former colonies in Africa and their French-born children.
“Tempers out here are at the boiling point,” said Ristet, whose route takes him through the town of Le Blanc Mesnil, where marauding teens torched two buses last month. “Things could explode at any moment.” So it’s with a knot in his stomach that the 41-year-old driver gets behind the wheel, fearing his bus could be next.
Ristet, an immigrant from the former Yugoslavia, considers himself lucky. In his 12 years with Paris’ public transit authority, he’s never been injured — despite having been spit on, pelted with rocks and even shot at while on the job.
|