1. Traveling to Mozambique was… well… hell. It was by far our worst set of travel days to date and likely (fingers crossed) our worst for the Race as a whole. We set out from Morogoro, Tanzania on Thursday, November 29th at 10 AM. We rode a bus for 10 hours to Mbeya, Tanzania, which was complete with a woman shamelessly shoving the back of my chair for the entire duration of the trip. (Highlight: We drove through an animal preserve and got to see monkeys, antelopes, and giraffes from our bus windows.)
We arrived in Mbeya, TZ at 8:30 PM on the 29th and stayed on the floor of a church for 2 nights. The rest of our squad arrived at 5 AM on the 30th from a safari that they had traveled to. The bus couldn’t fit through the church gate, so it busted the gate and got stuck in the entrance to the church. Leaving our squadmates stuck throwing their bags over the fence and climbing the fence so that they could get into the church.
We left Mbeya at 6:30 AM on December 1st and arrived in Lilongwe, Malawi at 3:30 AM on December 2nd. (21 hour bus ride) We camped at a hostel in Lilongwe (aka HEAVEN) for 2 nights.
We left Lilongwe at 8:30 AM on December 3rd and took a bus to the Malawi/Mozambique border, where we carried our bags across and changed buses. Again.
We spent 2 and a half hours trying to get visas at the unnecessarily difficult border. (Where, among many shady things, we had to bribe one of the officials to give us back a yellow fever card that belonged to one of the girls.)
Finally, we packed up and left and drove for 20 minutes before stopping again on the side of the road because the van drivers decided that they didn’t believe that we were missionaries and wanted to charge us tourist prices.
(van change again)
After about an hour and a half, we got back on the road. We arrived in Tete, Mozambique (aka HELL) at 9:00 PM on December 3rd. (12 and a half hours) Our leaders argued with the bus drivers for about an hour. The drivers refused to take us anywhere until morning, so we unloaded all of our packs and laid down to rest on the concrete at the bus station.
At around 11 PM, we were told there was a change of plans and we were all going to stay at a hostel down the street. So, we packed up our bags again and walked the long road to the creepiest place I’ve ever seen. It was dark and dirty and we were sweating buckets and sleeping on the floor of rooms that looked more like jail cells.
At midnight, Hannah, Julia, Ally, and I all decided that we were going to take matters into our own hands and find a cheap hotel to stay in so that we could actually get some sleep. We walked the streets searching for 2 hours. Everywhere we visited told us that they were full (When, lets be real, it was Tete, Mozambique. There was nobody in those hotels!) So, at 2 AM, we walked back to the hostel and suffered through the sweltering heat for the night.
We woke up at 10 AM on December 4 and found out that our bus would not be leaving until the next morning. Desperately in need of sleep, and in order to preserve the small amount of sanity we had left, we decided to try to find a hotel room again. We found a room at a cheap hotel with air conditioning and wifi. It was, without a doubt, the best choice of our entire lives. We spent most of the day there, resting and rejuvenating for whatever was still to come.
That night, I went grocery shopping with my team for our coming travel days. While we were there, our bus driver found Adam and told him that he needed to talk to KJ, our logistics coordinator, immediately. When they found KJ, the driver told him that because our bags were not already on the bus that night, he was giving us our money back and pulling out of the deal. KJ refused, so the driver said that if our packs weren’t all on the bus within the next 2 hours, we would lose our seats. Chaos ensued. The packs made it onto the bus in time, but that meant that for an entire night, everything we owned in the world for these 11 months sat unattended on a shady bus.
We woke up at 2:30 AM on December 5th to pack and head to the bus station by 3 AM. We boarded the bus at 3:30 AM and the bus left at 4:30 AM. The bus broke down on 3 different occasions, so we would sit for hours inside the bus or on the side of the road. The bus got stopped by the police at around 5 PM, so everyone and all of our belongings had to be removed from the bus.
At around 11 PM, the bus stopped for the night. All of the Africans got off of the bus and slept on the ground, so I took one of their seats and snuggled up with their suitcase. Miserable, miserable night.
The bust started back up at 4:30 AM on December 6th. My team arrived in Xao Xao, Mozambique at 7:30 AM and were dropped off in front of none other than the beautiful establishment known as KFC! (27 hour bus ride)
We waited for our contact to arrive and loaded up our packs. They were kind enough to wait with us until KFC opened at 9 AM and we got to enjoy a delicious meal!
With full bellies, 12 very happy World Racers climbed into a van for a 40 minute drive to a small village called Chibuto where we would be doing ministry for the next few days. We arrived and set up our tents inside our bamboo rooms and rested after a LONG week of travel.
Whew…
2. There were A LOT of critters in Chibuto. Within our first few days there, we had already seen giant spiders, snakes, massive centipedes, and a few scorpions. Some of our boys even had a black widow spider in their room, which they named Naomi. One night, I had just walked back to our rooms from dinner when I heard someone yelling for help. We ran around the side of our house to find Cassie who had been badly bitten or stung. She had forgotten to bring her headlamp to dinner, so she was walking back in the dark when she felt a sharp and terrible pain in her foot. She was crying and crying, and within minutes her foot was very swollen. We decided that she needed to go to the hospital, which made her cry even harder. We had just been told that day by our contact that the hospitals in Chibuto were awful. She said that they were dirty and that they reuse needles. So, I climbed into the back of the pick-up truck, and Cassie and Adam climbed in the front seat with our ministry contact. While we were driving, Cassie was pretty convinced that her life was ending, so she proceeded to wail about how she just wants to be a mom. Adam tried to console her by telling her that if it had been a poisonous snake, she would already be dead. It didn’t help. We finally made it to a janky hospital where they stuck her with 2 giant needles: one anti-venom and one allergy. They offered to give her something for the pain, but she declined so that she would know if the pain moved up her leg at all. She continued crying over the next hour, and eventually the hospital staff sent her home. Quality health care. Cassie spent the remainder of the night in the tent next to me moaning and whimpering in pain, while I hated the fact that there was absolutely nothing I could do to help. It was a miserable next few days, but eventually she was back to full health… And to full potential to be an awesome mom. Someday.
3. Our team came to Africa with a very important goal: To find someone who could translate the “Circle of Life” song for us. We thought that this was a simple request, but we found out very quickly that it was going to be much more of a challenge than we had hoped. In Kenya, our contacts told us that the language in the song was in a South African language, so they could not translate it for us. This gave us some hope, though, because our squad parents are South African, so we decided that we would ask them to translate it at the end of the month. When we asked our squad parents, they told us that it was in a South African language called Zulu, and they only spoke Africaans. They couldn’t help us either. We went all of our month in Tanzania searching for someone who could speak this Zulu language. No success. By the end of the month, we had pretty much given up on our quest. Until the end of this month…
We were sitting with our contact in Mozambique when he told us that he spoke something like 7 languages. He started listing off the languages that he spoke and one of them was none other than… ZULU!!! We got super excited and pulled out our phones to play the song for him. He translated the song easily. So… do you want to know the secret? The holy grail that we had spent our whole 3 months in Africa searching for? Are you sure you’re ready for this??
Okay… he told us that it was a lot of repetition of a few phrases:
“Our lion”
“Our strong lion”
“We will conquer with the lion”
…And then something about his mane.
So… Maybe not the most life-shattering thing we’d ever heard, but it was still cool to know that our goal had been achieved after all that time.
Neysa said that because she knew this, her life was complete.
We’re easily satisfied.
4. The last story I’m going to tell you this month is about a baby shower that we were invited to. Welll, we didn’t actually know that it was a baby shower when we went. Our contact’s wife told us that we were just going to walk over to the woman’s house and pray over her and the baby. So, we left the house in our scrubs and pajama pants, believing that we would be praying and coming straight home. How silly of us. We got to the woman’s house to find 20 or more women, all dressed to the nines, and bearing gifts. Awkward. We were invited in… with some judgmental glances at our wardrobe choices. They started singing and then all of the sudden, the tiny, 3-week old baby was being passed around the room. Women were literally tossing him in the air and catching him like a living loaf of bread. We were a little shocked, but having been in Africa for nearly 3 months, we were pretty used to people doing things differently. That is, until one woman took the baby and held him upside-down by one foot and started laughing and swinging him through the air. We were unable to hide the looks of terror on our faces. Some of the girls covered their mouths, some covered their eyes, some turned away, and others just stared with mouths open at the scene taking place. Once the baby was safely back in his mother’s arms, the baby shower progress with a lot more singing and some women standing and saying things (that we could not understand). After that, some women took pieces of cloth and stood around a woman who was crouched on the ground with the baby. We couldn’t see what was happening behind the sheets and I couldn’t help wondering, with the track record of the shower so far, if there was something crazy taking place. No worries, though, they were just changing his clothes. They laid the baby on a sheet and guests threw money and diapers at him. Gift-giving in a new light. We Americans were totally empty-handed. No doubt that we were considered to be pretty rude showing up to the party without a gift or any money. Not to mention the fact that we looked suspiciously like homeless people. Oh, Africa…
