Our team leader, Dusty, is pretty much in love with Africa. He’s been out here a few times on mission trips and it is one of his greatest passions. When we were all travelling from China just over a month ago he was easily the most excited of us. “We’re going to Africa!” we would exclaim to each other.
Our first month in Africa, specifically South Africa, was a great month, but a bunch of us have been discussing how westernised South Africa, or at least the Cape Town area, really is. What’s more, our team has been agreeing about how our first three months of the race were really abundant months for each of our original teams – rich food, readily available resources, idyllic locations. We’ve kind of been joking about waiting to ‘really’ start our race – live out more of the hardships that we have all read about in other World Race routes’ blogs.
Well we may have begun to delve into that. Cue Mozambique. Our entering the country was still marked with abundance – whilst we had a 30 hour coach ride from Cape Town to Maputo (the longest single bus ride I’ve had) the coach itself was a blessing because we had it to ourselves with air conditioning, on-board entertainment, a fridge and a toilet. What’s more, those of us travelling a bit further than Maputo were put up by friends of one of the married couples on our squad – two terraced bungalows used by missionary teams that we got to stay in for the night and a meal prepared by our amazing hosts.
Then we got our bus onwards. A bus that in England would probably seat 14 here had 26 on it, then our packs. Fortunately for us we only had 4 hours in these conditions – the other 2 teams with us had another 20 hours to go after that. Allegedly. It’s now 26 hours since we left them and I don’t think they’ve gotten there yet.
We are living in a small village called Incaia, near the town of Macai, based with a pastor called Antonio, who works with OM (Operation Mobilisation) training pastors and encouraging churches in the nearby villages. He is in contact with over 24 different churches and associated communities and during our time here we will be assisting him in whatever ways we can. We are not yet sure if we will be doing any manual labour here, but it is a possibility (teams usually bring funds for such projects with them, but obviously our WR budget doesn’t cover anything quite that big).
Conditions? We have set up our tents as mosquito nets on the concrete floors of a couple of rooms and have our sleeping pads as mattresses this month. There is some clean running water available whilst the rest comes from rain water. One of the two buildings (not where we sleep) has some electricity. Temperature is high and I have about 20 small bumps across my face right now – we’re not sure if they are bites or a reaction to something, but I definitely have a dozen-ish bites on other parts of me anyway There is one small supermarket nearby and a lot of outdoor market stalls for our groceries and we’ve already seen at least a couple of women openly breast feeding.The nearest internet café is 60km away and so blogging will probably be a little irregular (we’re holding out hope of getting to a café for a Christmas connection so watch this space).
All Dusty has to say to us? “Welcome to [the real] Africa”. Bring it on.
