After a most delightful day of bus travels – teams HIND’S FEET, CRASH, CITY LIGHTS, and SOAR have made it safely to San Juan, Dominican Republic. This month we’ll be pooling our resources and space in one house, living in community – and growing together as 4/11 of the p-squad. Our remaining 7 teams will be ministering this month throughout Haiti – so keep us all in your prayers as we begin a new chapter of the race – a fresh month with beautiful opportunities to release God’s love to those we encounter in the D.R.
Now…speaking of that delightful bus journey…it went a little something like this: (note: all times are relative…and now that I’ve officially lost my watch…very relative!)
5:30 am – load up rainbow ‘Jesus Divine’ bus in Port au Prince and travel to bus stop
7:00 am – wait for tickets, loading of 2nd bus + purchasing of many Tampico juices on the street
8:30 am – bus rolls out of Port au Prince
noon(ish) – arrive at the Dominican/Haiti border, exit bus, get stamped out of Haiti, re-board
bus, exit bus, get stamped into the D.R, consume mystery lunch meat + beans n’ rice.
2:43(ish) – bus rolls up mystery hill and begins to shudder. Bus rolls backwards. Attempt #2.
Fail. Attempt # 3. Fail. Grunting of gears. Fail.
2:45(ish) – Mass exit of all passengers from bus. Walk up the hill and wait for bus to get enough
energy to make the hill…in the meantime 2-3 other buses stop to check on the abundant # of white people and various passengers standing on the side of the road.
3:00 – broken bus makes it to the top of the hill
3:05 – all non-white passengers instructed to get on a new bus – cargo areas opened
3:07 – change of plans: all world racers move to new bus (which just so happened to be
practically empty – and contained enough seats for us all to ride safely.)
Thank you Jesus! Empty broken bus – reload new bus. Rubber containers in the overhead compartment shift during transit. Lauren N. gets smoked in the eye with a bottle of strawberry jam that skimmed off Kyle’s head – and Jake catches flying rubber container with one hand on its 2nd fall.
Drive on to Santo Domingo.
5:30(ish) – arrive in Santo Domingo at mystery location belonging to our “new buses” station.
Realize we’ve missed our transition bus to San Juan. Unload packs to street and pray.
5 minutes later – bus arrives next to our packs ready to shuttle us to our 5th bus of the day…the one finally taking us to San Juan.
6:00 (ish) – arrive at final bus station. Unload packs and reload 2 shuttle buses for San Juan.
Break for water and the washrooms. Random group of men emerge with large television
quality camera and start filming “the white people” in the parking lot. Not sure what we were about to become a part of, we are approached by a man and told to “interact” while they filmed. We laughed. We talked. We wondered what we were being filmed for. Perhaps a commercial or promo video for the Caribe bus company.
6:30(ish) – Begin journey to San Juan. Bus pulls over so the driver can relieve himself on the
side of the road. Watch a karate movie and random Spanish music videos. Stop at random store and the boys buy us ice cream. Curl up in sleeping liner as the artic air-conditioning allows us all to pretend it’s the middle of January in Northern Maine.
A little after 10…arrive at the house in San Juan…thankful for a day’s adventurous journey. Everyone finds a place to crash and sleeps…
