3 Countries in 32 Hours–African Travel Days on the WR

Come to find out, the 12 noon bus never came and now it was 3 pm and not a single member of S squad had made any progress in getting to Tanzania. After a while, the 12 noon group finally left at 4 pm and shortly after that, our 5 pm bus showed up at 6:30 pm…not bad, considering we were all betting that we wouldn’t leave Jinja until about 9. We gathered our things and got on the bus and everything was fine and dandy until we reached the border of Kenya and had to get off the bus and apply for a “transit visa”. The first group of S squaders were able to get through no problem, without having to pay any Shillings for the visa. They communicated this to us via text so we showed up to the border expecting the same kind of treatment.

 

We got to the border at about 9 pm and the border patrol tried to munipulate us into paying a 20 USD fee for passing through their country. Unfortunately, sometimes when you’re American, people will try and take advantage of you, economically speaking. This isn’t always the case, but there are corrupt people everywhere waiting for the next victim to take advantage of. Thankfully, we have some fierce people on our squad and they refused to pay the cash so after a lot of arguing at the counter, he let us go free of charge. This is when things got a tad bit sketchy…

 

Instead of getting back onto the bus and driving through the border, you have to physically walk across a football sized dirt area between Uganda and Kenya. This wouldn’t be as questionable in the day time, but since it was very dark (Africa doesn’t have a lot of electricity, if you didn’t already know that) we had to fend off beggars in the dark and make it to “the Kenya side” to get on the bus. I thank God every day for the amazing men on S squad and what wonderful brothers they are to us women. We were very protected and taken care of during that time and anytime one of us ladies would started getting hassled by a guy, the men would step in and stop it. Chivalry is not dead, friends, and it’s a beautiful thing. We made it to the other side of the border but we did not find our bus. Well, after an hour of waiting and waiting, it finally pulled up to the 30 of us, squatting in the mud, exhausted from the hussle and bussle of our first border crossings.

 

We got back on the bus and my bus buddy, Cody and I watched a few episodes of “Boy Meets World” on my computer, and absolutely squished because Danielle (our squad mate sitting in front of Cody) had a broken chair so she was leaned all the way back in his seat, making his legs in an even more uncomfortable position for both of us. Awkwardly positioned and sitcomed out, we all tried to get some shut eye before having to switch buses the next morning in Nairobi. The unfortunate thing about the bus we were on was that the windows were very old and wouldn’t stay shut so none of us could sleep because of how freezing cold the outside temperature was making the inside of the bus. Shivering and shaking we drove into Nairobi, Kenya at 7 am the next morning, still very tired and cold from the night before. This is when we had to get off the bus we were on and onto another bus, that was bound for Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

 

Everyone had their 50 pound backpack/duffel to haul a block away to where the next bus was and we all looked rough and felt even rougher at this point. We made it onto the next bus and were greeted with a bus attendant holding brown sack breakfasts complete with a hard boiled egg, a samosa (deep fried meat filled African pastry) and some chapati (flat bread that’s delicious). I was near the back, this time sitting with Emily as my bus buddy, and with my team mate, Nikki Medders, behind us. The ridiculous thing about where Nikki was sitting was the pure fact that she had a crate of live chickens under her seat and they were moving around making it even more impossible to get comfortable in the back of the bus. I couldn’t stop laughing, because I had never traveled with live poultry before, especially for 16+ hours, so I knew this would be interesting.

 

We noticed the man sitting in front of Emily seemed to be very out of place. He was German with a shaved head, covered in tattoos (one of which was a picture of a naked woman on his forearm) and smoking like a chimney. We knew this could only lead to trouble but we were too tired to care. As soon as the bus took off we took some sleep meds and dozed off for a little while until we were awakened by the bus attendant asking us all in the back to move to the front of the bus so we would be “correctly porportioned” for the bus to get weighed at the weigh station we were at. Since Emily and I had both taken sleeping pills we were extremely drugged out and disoriented when we were taken to the very front of the bus to sit on boxes next to the driver. Angela Grit, another team mate of mine was asked to sit near the middle of the bus and noticed some soup-like substance on the floor next to her new seat. She came to find out from her new seat mates that this was vomit that no one had cleaned up but was just left to fester and stink up the place. Awesome.

 

So now we were all completely out of it, smelling vomit that had been sitting out for only God knows how long, being weighed at just the right portions so the bus driver wouldn’t get a fine for having too much weight at the back of the bus. We were done about a half hour later and were able to get back to our seats when the German man sitting in front of Emily decided to make small talk with us. I noticed he was still smoking and the bus attendant kept coming back and yelling at him to stop but this just made him open the window and smoke sticking his head out of the bus. He was telling us he had been exiled from the US and Europe and now has been living in Kenya for the last five years as a “business man”…whatever that means. We were all too afraid to ask anymore questions but from the smell of his breath I could tell that his 1 liter bottle of Sprite he was drinking did not, in fact, have any Sprite in it…but pure vodka.

 

After talking to the German man about how he was going to fix all of Africa’s problems (it was a very long conversation) we made it to the border of Kenya and Tanzania. This process was much more pleasant than the border crossing the night before. We made it through the lines, getting our one-year multi-entry visas for a whopping 100 USD (one of the more expensive visas for the year) and were even able to exchange money from Kenyan Shillings to Tanzanian Shillings. Once we got back on the bus we started watching episodes of “Community” when all of a sudden the German man’s seat reclines all the way back into Emily’s lap and stays there. When we tried to get him to move up a little, he claimed his chair was “stuck” and there was nothing he could do about it. So there we were, smelling like cigarettes, vodka and sin, with 8 more hours on the bus to go.

 

We got off at a rest stop to eat dinner and were met with another bus full of muzungus…and wouldn’t you know it, they were World Race muzungus we hadn’t seen for almost 24 hours!! We found out their bus had completely broken down (which was how we had caught up to them) but we didn’t have time to chat for long. The bus driver told us we had precisely 10 minutes to get our dinner to go, give a quick hug to our friends and get back on the bus, or he threatened to leave without us. The German man bought all of us gum, which was weird and random but we chewed it out of obligation and fear that if we didn’t, he would do to us whatever he got exiled out of the US/Europe for. We finally made it to final destination of Dar Es Salaam at 12:30 am, were driven inside of a warehouse/bus terminal, and were locked in for “safety reasons”. We found out we needed to be locked in because we were in the worst and most dangerous part of the city.

 

  looked around the big warehouse we were in and realized a lot of men were living there. There was a giant cauldron boiling water over an open fire (which reminded me of the Disney classic movie, “Hocus Pocus”) and a few old Lazy Boy recliners. I couldn’t tell if the men were homeless or other bus drivers, but again…I was too tired to care that much. We were running low on squad food so I sucked on a grape juice box and decided to wait until morning to eat food. Our team’s contact for the month came to pick the 30 of us up and by 2 am we reached our home for the next 28 days. Since it was too late for any of the other teams to go to their specific ministry locations, they all crashed at our tiny house.

 

Sharing a home with seven people is hard enough in a three-bedroom African house, but sharing it with 30 people is even more hectic. We quickly found out that the house did not have running water, so everyone decided they were not in the mood to take bucket showers. We shoved all the girls in the bedrooms with all our backpacks and the men ever-so-graciously slept out in the living room on the couches and on floor. The next morning I woke up on a tent tarp on top of a very dirty mattress on the floor next to Emily, Haile and Angela. I didn’t remember where I was and then soon realized that everything that had happened the day(s) before was not a dream, but my life this year. I went into the kitchen for breakfast and found five of my squad mates sitting on the floor, eating what was left of our food rations. We had the very last bit of Nutella, some peanut butter and a bag full of bread crumbs (which was originally sliced bread but didn’t survive all the traveling and getting squished and smooshed around for the 32 hours). I felt like this was an accurate interpretation of what a crack house would be like. We had no electricity or running water, we were eating on the ground because of no furniture, we were dining on the very last bit of food we had and everyone was extremely dirty and greasy from lack of showers.

 

Sitting on the mattress on the floor back in our bedroom, we decided re-evaluate our decision making paradigm and think about how we had gotten to this stage of our life. This is when Cody came in and informed us that three more teams from the other bus group were on our way to the house to stay the night with us. We said that various buses weren’t going to leave for ministry locations until the next morning so now we had the 30 people in the house for another night plus another 20 people to house. Thankfully, our land lord, Dr. Hellen, offered her house that is next door to ours and said people could sleep on the floor for one night at her place. This was an answered prayer since we literally didn’t have anywhere to put any more bodies at the house we were in.

 

That afternoon a group of us decided to go to the grocery store to get food for all 50 of us and my team mate, Alana Lusted, decided she needed to go to the hospital and get tested for malaria. She had been sick for a while now and we all agreed it was best to get some blood work done and figure out what was wrong. We dropped Alana and Nikki off at the hospital near by, got food for dinner and came back to the hospital to find Alana on her fourth IV drip, not diagnosed with malaria (PRAISE THE LORD) but just a parasite. She got some medication and we went on our way. Later that night, Alana told us that during her examination the power in the entire hospital went out so the doctor and all the nurses used the lights from their cell phones to finish her check up and IVs. Only in Africa. Only in Africa…

 

That night we all had fun playing cards, eating sandwiches and watching movies and I realize now that it’s nights like those and travel days like the ones we’ve had that I will miss the most when the Race is over and done with. Yes, mu World Race family can be very insane and we get into the craziest adventures, but in all honesty, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love each and every one of them and travel days are some of my fondest memories because it’s the time we get to spend all together as a squad, giggling and experiencing life in the third-world as the body of Christ that we are. I hope that this gave every one of you readers an accurate description of what a travel day on the World Race in Africa is like and that you enjoyed following along with our silly shinanigans. I can’t believe it’s already Month 10…I’m starting to get very nostalgic, and really don’t want to leave these people I’ve been traveling the world with this year.