We pick back up with my World Race confessions in month seven – Malawi!
7. I ate the Chocolate Bunny…
In my defense, it was Peanut Butter filled! Back story: at each debrief, our beloved J Squad coaches, Jay and Denise, would treat each team to special things that we might not have been able to get our hands on throughout the months prior. During month six, in Malawi, that meant they brought LOTS of goodies! One particular gift that was prized among my team was a peanut butter filled chocolate rabbit (this visit landed just before Easter.) As team leader, all the goodies for Just Love (a mammoth jar of Jiff, some other candies, the Bunny, etc.) were entrusted to me and taken back to my bunk for safe keeping before travel to our month’s ministry. A day or so later, my teammate Liz (noticing a pattern of who I got in trouble with most often?) came up to me in a moment of stress, and in true leadership fashion, my first option for comforting her was to offer her chocolate. I told her to break a few pieces off the chocolate bunny. Hours later when I returned to my bunk, I found the poor animal had been completely decapitated! I’m not sure what came over me in that moment; I’d like to think it was an inner inkling of wanting to save Liz from ridicule over eating such a large portion of the prize. Who can really say? All I know is… I ate the butt (and everything else!) My team didn’t find out until a few weeks later, but I made up for it and bought each of them their own personal chocolate bar. Clearly I’m not above groveling and bribery!
We were talking from our individual tents one night, weeks after the incident, when my team found out what had become of the Bunny. 😉 Month Seven.
8. There was this one time I thought I’d been kidnapped…
During our month of ministry in Swaziland, transportation was perhaps the most unusual of the entire Race. We very literally hitchhiked on an almost daily basis. While our intentions were generally noble – we would walk to the closest bus stand and wait for a local transportation van to come by – said vans were very few and far between, and because they were so sparse, by the time they got to us, they were usually too crammed for any semblance of comfort. Option B, which usually won out, was to just start walking toward our destination (anywhere from four to six miles away) and proceed to wave at any passing vehicles in hopes that the driver might take pity on us. On one such occasion, my Squad-mates, Timothy and Jaclyn, were trekking with me to the only “nearby” restaurant and lodge, where we could get Internet access to do weekly business for our teams. We hadn’t been walking long when we were able to flag down a pickup with plenty of room for two of us in the bed and one in the cab. The driver said he knew the place we needed to go and was happy to give us a lift. Perfect! Timothy and I climbed into the bed and sat back for the now-speedy trip to Nisela Lodge. Shortly into our motorized venture, our vehicle made an unnecessary turn onto a winding, dirt road that none of us had ever been on. We drove past fields of sugarcane, an orange orchard and a game reserve, and continued bumping along some of the roughest terrain imaginable until it became clear that we were headed up the side of one of the mountains we’d been starring at from afar all month! Umm… okay? Up the mountain we went, hanging on to our laptop-containing packs with one hand and any part of the truck we could find with the other, all the while wondering where in the heck this guy was taking us. Alas, we finally pulled into a tiny hut community around the halfway point of the mountain, and there, an elderly lady proceeded to join us in the truck bed. We swapped pleasantries, but that was about all we could do before descending the mountain again. Our worries were eased a bit when the driver graciously allowed Jaclyn to get in the truck bed with us, the bumpy roads and crowded cab not a great combination for her stomach. Sure enough, about an hour after we’d jumped in the friendly guy’s pickup, he dropped us at our destination, unharmed. Do NOT try this at home!
9. I like to think I can drive a stick shift…
My first day back to “normal” ministry after spending a week working alongside my mom during AIM’s newly developed Parent Vision Week, I was exhausted! We Racers discovered that blending our two worlds, while a blessing and incredibly beneficial, was a task that took a lot out of us, mentally and physically. Needless to say, I was pretty out of it, and hence would agree to anything. Anything like saying I was totally fine with attending/leading three church services in one day, one of which I would need to drive to. Let me be straight up. My grandfather taught me to drive stick-shift literally the summer before I left on the World Race. I have the basic concepts, but my amount of actual drive time is pretty low. That said, when you have to get to church, you have to get to church. My friend Morgan and I loaded up with our contact, Danut, and off we went. I killed the engine three or four times (in the middle of town) before I finally got the hang of things. Danut’s English was barely better than Morgan’s or my Romanian, so there wasn’t much coaching available, like there would have been with my grandfather! Five minutes into our trip, I was wringing wet with a nervous sweat! Bless Morgan’s heart, she was a phenomenal encourager and while she knows nothing about driving stick-shift, she made me feel like I knew everything! After thirty minutes or so, we arrived at our first destination, and while Danut went to gather some more passengers, I noticed a thin trickle of smoke rolling from the rear left tire. Come to find out, none of us had noticed that the emergency brake had never been released. YIKES! After we caught on, the trip went much, much smoother!
10. “No Alone Time” includes in the outhouse…
During the second half of our month in Moldova, my team lived in our own private home, complete with two bedrooms, a dining room, a kitchen (WITH AN OVEN), a summer shower AND an outhouse that would easily rival something you might have seen on Slumdog Millionaire. In a tiny 3×3 space, one was expected to stand on an elevated platform and hover over the “modified” squatty potty. (We actually debated if this was the proper technique or if you were supposed to sit, and really, it all came down to how tired your legs were at the time…) Alas, the odd stance wouldn’t have been a big deal, were it not for the enormous colony of bees constantly buzzing just below your… parts. Add to that the ridiculously cramped space, and it’s easy to see how one might not look forward to frequent trips to the potty – I assure you, in Moldova I made my share. Since our home was located in a fairly remote area, and the outhouse was several yards behind the normal home, I took to leaving the door open any time I had to make a visit. Something about open scenery in front of me made the situation more bearable. Unfortunately, the whole “squatting” concept requires a bit of concentration, and apparently in my case, looking down. On one such occasion, I completely blindsided poor Karen as she was en route to use the facilities herself… Whoops!
The infamous outhouse. Month Ten.
11. We nearly burnt a house down in Dublin…
This one actually outs the whole Squad (and our coaches, Jay and Denise, who will probably want to kill me if they read this!) Alas, confessions. On our final night of the Race, after our last worship session together and before packing and taking our ultimate flight the next day, our coaches proposed the incredible sentiment of setting off Japanese lanterns to commemorate the occasion. Awesome thought! However, we encountered a few problems. For one, by this time it was past 10 PM in Dublin, when there is a quiet rule enforced in certain parts of the city, including where we were staying. And another, our venture happened to culminate on a particularly windy evening. Never-the-less, we persevered, and fought through the wind to get the first of 55 lanterns lit. At last, a lone lantern sailed into the Dublin sky, and we all silently watched it climb 10… 20 feet above our heads. The gasps and shrieks started as the first gust of wind caught the little fire ball and pushed it toward a residential building (our hostel, mind you) which was covered in greenery. I’m sure we were all praying madly in that moment, and it must have worked, because the greenery didn’t catch ablaze. Instead, the lantern shot up another 10 feet or so and finally crashed on a rooftop next door! As Jay sprinted to the door of the home we’d potentially just torched, he exclaimed, “New plan! Take them home and light them there!”
Hope you’ve enjoyed these glimpses into embarrassing World Race moments as much as I’ve enjoyed reliving them! Apologies to anyone on J Squad that I’ve now incriminated! LOVE YOU! Please feel free to share some of your own embarrassing moments or confessions from the past eleven months!
Be Blessed,
Ashlee
