In one week, we have gone from languishing in Blantyre to frolicking in Beira, Mozambique. I don’t know if I can muster the energy to relive all the hairy details of our ridiculous race from Malawi to Mozambique (let alone the cruelty to inflict them on you), so instead I’ve written a few short stories with some of the highlights and lowlights of it all.
For your frame of reference, these events took place from Tuesday, August 5 to Wednesday, August 6.
Story One is called Three More Hours. With less than a day’s notice, Team Oak (and two other teams) were told to pack up and be ready to go to Mozambique via a different border early the next morning. At 7 a.m. the next day 21 of us crowded into two 15 passenger vans with our 42 backpacks. The ride to the border was only 2 hours. And we crossed into Mozambique shockingly easily.
“The worst is over!” we cried giddily, exchanging dorky high fives. From here we only had six hours to go to Gorongosa (a city infamous for malarial mosquitoes and not much else). There, the other two teams would stay with a South African missionary couple, and Team Oak would drive another 3 hours to Kedesh, a boys’ home outside Beira. We’d be there for dinner. It would be easy.
Oh, but it wasn’t. It was horrible.
That last blog, “Stranded?” That stuff was a hassle; it was a little freaky. I thought for a second we would get shot peeing in the bushes. Yes, we were not allowed in Malawi, Mozambique, or the space in between. But we were still able to be relatively good natured about it. We worked it out.
The bus ride we took on this day wasn’t interesting, and there isn’t much to say about it other than this: it was awful. It was brutally, unrelentingly, painfully awful.
Everything you don’t want to experience on a bus ride happened on this bus ride. We had to put about 17 people into 12 seats. Read my blog Jenda Equality. It was that kind of situation.
But also, there was some crazy carsickness for some of us. One of our vans could only go about 30 miles an hour or it would overheat.
We were stopped over and over again by the police and instructed to get out and show our passports and yellow fever cards. Back in October, my nurse accidentally wrote her name on my yellow fever card before crossing it out and putting mine above it. The police of Mozambique did not like that and it took a lot of explaining and pointing to be cleared to continue.
But the worst part was the way our two vans would stop every three hours. We’d get out and stretch, and ask how long it would be until we reached Gorongosa (surely, any minute, we thought, as the shadows lengthened and the day cooled). And every time we asked, we were told the same thing:
“three more hours.”
We were not anywhere for dinner. Instead of six hours of driving, we were crawling through Mozambique, sealed into a humid, stinky van until 7:00… the next morning.
The next story is called Animals.
Around midnight, our van stopped in a small town across the street from a brightly-lit restaurant. The driver told us we had to stop there. The police didn’t want anyone driving on the next stretch of road until morning because it was too late. Too miserable and tired to protest, most of us slumped onto each other and tried to sleep.
That’s when the drunk man came up to our window and told us about the animals. His name was Nito (pronounced “neat-o!”), and he told us we were silly to drive so late at night.
“Why are you going to Gorongosa?” he demanded. “Park and spend the night here.”
“We’re just going to keep driving,” said Bre.
“No, you can’t do that,” protested Nito. “It’s time to sleep!”
When we brushed off the suggestion again, Nito switched to fear tactics.
“There are animals on the road,” he explained. He made a motion somewhere around the base of the van.
“Animals?” I pictured lions and giraffes, out at night, waiting to sabotage vehicles.
“There are so many animals. This car is no good. You need to park it and use a different car.” Nito was pretty hellbent on getting us all to… well, I’m not sure exactly why he was so invested in our plan. He didn’t work at a hotel, or parking garage, or taxi service. Our staying in whatever this place was would not have resulted in any gain for him. In fact, he was in the nursing business.
“I’m a nurse,” he said. Then he squeezed Bre’s butt to reinforce the fact. No, other than that, he just really seemed to care that we got to bed soon, and that we didn’t have any animal problems.
While some of the more patient and tactful passengers in our van discussed the animals and other subjects (“You work for churches? Why don’t you just work with churches here?”) with Nito, I sat in the back seat and discovered some of our own animals right there! I hadn’t noticed in the last 10 hours, but the wall of the van was covered with tiny cockroaches. Most of them were nestling in a busted pink wall speaker. I thought about crushing them with my hand, water bottle, bag of chips… until I looked on the floor and saw a stick of sugarcane. Perfect. I started stabbing at the animals and they fled, taking refuge in cracks and crevices under the seats.
I don’t know what Nito was talking about. This was a perfect car for animals.
Story Three is called Mat.
After dealing with all those animals and coming to terms with the fact that we would be stuck in this little town indefinitely, I crossed the street to the brightly lit restaurant, which was still inexplicably open at 2:00 a.m. Nicole and Kelsey were napping on the stoop and I joined them, lying partly under a plastic card table. We were just there on the dirty concrete, too sleepy to realize how gross we were being. An employee, a tall, skinny man with Middle Eastern features, stepped out and looked at us and said something.
“Okay?” I asked, pointing at ourselves, lolling in the doorway of his establishment.
“Sim,” he said, and disappeared. We sighed with relief and relaxed, all three of us using Nicole’s backpack for a pillow.
A moment later the man returned. He carried a big bamboo mat. He motioned for us to stand up. We rose and watched the mat unfurl with a snap in a single pristine moment of divine charity. We didn’t know “thank you” in Portuguese yet, so we said it in English and fell asleep again. We slept for almost two hours in front of that restaurant.
When we got up to continue along the now cleared road, we saw the restaurant had closed and our angel had been sitting on the porch the whole time. When we left, he stood, rolled up the mat, and disappeared.
Story Four: Gazelle.
When we finally arrived in Gorongosa 12 hours late, Maria and Jaco, the contacts for the other two teams, gave us tea and coffee while breakfast heated up. Breakfast was in two massive cast iron pots suspended over a fire. It was supposed to have been our dinner the last night. In one pot was rice. In the other was gazelle.
Have you ever had gazelle stew? It’s wonderful. The meat was flavorful and tender and gamey, and Maria had added huge chunks of carrots, potatoes, and cabbage. Peppercorns and star anise and who knows what other spices got stuck in my teeth. It was comfort food, but not like Kraft Mac & Cheese. It was comfort food like you’d expect to have in the middle of nowhere in Africa on a log in front of a house made of tarps with rooibos tea after a treacherous, grueling 24-hour drive across a border and through a wilderness of Nito’s animals.
Story Five: Bashew’s.
It felt like a night passed at Maria and Jaco’s house but it was only several hours later that Jaco loaded his pickup to take us to Beira, the last leg of our journey. The bed of the truck was piled high with our luggage, but four of us still had to ride back there and I frantically called, “It’s mine! I’ll sit there!” All eager and stuff. For some reason the other team members weren’t as keen on sitting back there for four hours.
It was a long drive and cramped, but having the wind in our faces made all the difference. Bre and I sat with our travel-weary legs sticking out in the air, and Heidi and Jason perched on top of the bags.
On the previous day’s hellish bus ride, cops had pestered us constantly. They always want something to be wrong with your paperwork. They want to catch foreigners without their passports so they can fine them. And since we look so out of place, white people with a lot of baggage get hassled the most. I had chuckled when Maria prayed for us as we drove away: “Lord, let no one see their white skin,” but now I was thanking God. Because even with our white faces outside for all the world to see, we had a perfectly uneventful ride.
It had been a long enough time since the gazelle stew to eat again. I opened a can of Bashew’s raspberry soda and a package of dry ramen noodles. My confidence bolstered by the ease of our journey, I gnawed open the curry flavored spice packet and sprinkled it on the block of noodles. Of course, most of the powder blew away in the wind.
Yes, I had just spent a solid day on a cramped, cockroach-y, carsick bus ride that had me hating the World Race. Yes, we were exhausted. But this was a new day. I was riding in the bed of a pickup, eating dry noodles and sickeningly sweet soda with my friends. We were, at last, headed to our ministry site for the month. God brought us through. People had been kind. All was good.
