Back out in the outback – Part I

When you think of visiting Australia, you might conjure up images such as touring the Sydney Opera House or snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef. I know I was looking forward to laying my eyes on some of the picturesque touristy stuff that most people associate with Australia…and I couldn’t have more wrong. We started our journey in Darwin, the small capital city of the Northern Territory. We piled our packs on top of a big white 1989 Toyota Land Cruiser “Troopie” and secured it with a giant blue tarp since it would likely downpour at some point during the day for most of our time here. We stopped at the supermarket to grab some food for the ride and cooked hotdogs wrapped in tin foil in the engine block as we drove. Not exactly the Aussie cuisine I had in mind, but a great foreshadow off how the rest of the month’s feasts would look like. After four hours in the car dodging several wallabies along the way, we arrive at a farm outside Katherine, Australia. We were suprised to find out that they had bunks for us to sleep in for the night. We were more surprised to find that the bunks were infested with daddy longlegs and other possibly poisonous species of 8-legged creatures. Fun! We survived the night and spent the rest of the weekend fellowshipping with some of the local aboriginal tribal churches near town.

Our next assignment was to drive outside of town an hour and a half to an aboriginal village called Beswick, a village of about 600, to help with their local church. The goal of our contact, Carl, is to help establish a church community that is self sustaining and meets regularly without relying too heavily on outside missionaries. As it is now, the church struggles to maintain regular meetings, particularly during the rainy season, but when missionaries like ourselves show up, for some reason they get together. So, we met campfire style for the next few days, sitting around in a circle in their open air basketball court singing praise songs and sharing God’s word with them. It was really neat to get to spend time with them and share some of our testimonies. It’s amazing that people on the other side of the world worship the same God and we can unite as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Our time had come to move on to the next village. Carl aims to minister to about 30 villages throughout the aboriginal land in the Northern Territory & Queensland. The next stop was Bulman, a 5-hour journey down a bumpy dirt road. We weaved in and out of potholes and crossed several rivers along the way. It thunderstormed and the road was dark. Around midnight, out team pulled up to this river that looked way too deep and wide to cross. We got out of the truck to see if we could get a better guage of whether the river was crossable, and when we shined our flashlights along the edge, all we could see crocodile eyes looming back our way. The troopie we “rented” for the month doesn’t have a snorkel like most of the trucks here, and we didn’t want to risk flooding the engine, so we had no other choice but to camp out for the night. Mind you, other than some wild brumbies and a few grazing cattle, we hadn’t seen evidence of life since we had left the other village 5 hours before. Thank God we happened to get stranded right outside this little general store that had little yard lights which meant it could viably have humans nearby. We pitched Chelsea’s tent on top of the troopie and called it a night. Trey, Ben & Julie camped out in the cab.

A voice woke us in the morning. “Hello,” she questioned, “hello?” I unzipped the rainfly to find this Aussie woman a bit perplexed to find a couple of white twenty-something girls sleeping on top of a truck in the middle of aboriginal land. We explained our predicament and she welcomed us in her store for some coffee. She confirmed what we already thought was true…that the river was far too deep to cross and we’d be stranded for a couple of days. It had rained several times since we left the village and she said she had word that the way back was flooded now, too, so we were stuck in either direction. These couple of days ended up being a ministry in itself. The store owner, Sonja, lived there with her husband, but he usually wasn’t around. She was there all by herself most of the time. Trey was able to share his testimony with her and she could relate to where he had come from. It was encouraging to see God work though us in this side ministry opportunity.