Part two of our travel day to our ministry location in Mbeya, Tanzania!
Click here to see the first half of our travel from our ministry site in Ukraine to the capitol of Tanzania, East Africa.
Tuesday, June 5th
We were supposed to be down at the entrance of the hotel at 5am to be rolling out of our hotel in Dar es Salaam at 530am. There was a rumor going around that we actually needed to leave at 5am, so most of us were downstairs and ready by 445am. By the time I had showered and packed, I didn’t get to bed until 130am. Yikes!
We are all down at the front waiting by 5am, and the bus isn’t there.
530am- no bus.
600am- Apparently they are cleaning the bus and will be there soon.
630am- No bus.
700am- No bus.
730am- The bus arrives! We start packing all of the packs on the top of the bus. The bus is TINY. It had 6 rows of 4… room for 24 people. NOT enough room for the 35 of us. We start packing five people into a row… it was awful. Finally the drivers decide that the bus is too small and they are going to bring us a bigger bus. We all get out of the bus. I am extremely relieved.
800am- We are all our of the bus. I overhear Ashley talking with the driver… she asks, “Will the bigger bus be here in one hour? Maybe?” The driver, “Umm…. Maybe two.” Okay. Two hours. Africa time- probably longer.
800am to 1100pm- We all eat breakfast at the hotel, some people walk to the ATM, and almost everyone floods the dining area to use the free wifi, which works surprisingly fast.
1100am- Everyone is back at the front, waiting for the bus.
1145- THE BUS ARRIVES!!!!! Unfortunately, it is impossible to put bags on the top of the bus, so all of the bags have to go in the back of the bus. Physically, it looks impossible that they will all fit in there AND we will all fit in there. We pray and get on the bus. By some miracle of God, we all fit. We prepare for the supposed 12 hours bus ride.
1230pm- Roll out.
430pm- Arrive in Morogoro. Go to the bathroom, buy bananas. Back on the road.
The rest of the travel is blurry to me… we stop two more times to go to the bathroom- once is an actual rest stop and the other is just a squat behind the bus on the side of the road. We also get stopped every few hours by Tanzanian policeman that have check-in stations all along the highway. At one point we are stopped for over half an hour and multiple men come on the bus and ask us questions about what we are doing. Finally, they let us go. Then sometime around 2am we stop at a rest stop for the driver to sleep for two hours. It’s FREEZING (okay, maybe not freezing, but probably 60 degrees with the wind blowing while the bus is moving and I only have a thin sweater, because it’s Africa for Pete’s sake!) and by this time we are so ready to get off the bus that stopping for two hours feels like an eternity. Sometime around 4am we get back on the road. Also, ever since we have arrived in Tanzania we have only had the money to buy bread, jam, apples, peanuts, and potato chips. This is what we were eating on the road.
Wednesday, June 6th
630am- WE ARRIVE IN MBEYA!!! We had no idea we were there, we just spontaneously pulled over on the side of the road and our contacts were there to greet us. They gave us some food and then let us sleep. Thank goodness. 12 hours turned into 18 hours, but by some miracle the bus never broke down and we all survived. I feel blessed that I wasn’t part of one of the other two teams, who ended up having to spend part of the day in Mbeya and then take another nine hour bus ride to their ministry location…. But they got there!
We have somewhere around a 24 hour bus ride to Nairobi in a week… I’m not really looking forward to it. However, we are supposed to stop in Arusha, which is where I lived for four months. Pray that our layover will be long enough to visit the city again!
