All right, so, Malawi. Let’s start with debrief. While at debrief, talking with a teammate, they told me that they were praying for crazy things this month. “Crazy God, crazy adventure, crazy crazy.” I thought that sounded great. Honestly the race has been pretty hard, even though it’s been amazing at the same time. Even though it’s been great, most months have been hard with some really good parts, but we talked about how this month was going to be really good with some hard parts. We talked about how God was really going to take us on some crazy adventures and how this month was going to be really fun. Now, in the moment of some of this stuff, I would not exactly call it fun, but it’s been pretty crazy. I definitely have some stories to tell, and all of those things are fun now, not a bad turn around time I’d say.
So let’s start with our travel day. We started out from debrief, which was on Lake Malawi. We got into a mini bus at 5:00 am that took us to Monkey Bay. From there we got onto a large crowded bus that took us to Lilongwe, that took about 7 hours. From Lilongwe we got picked up by our host and his friend. Now let me preface this next part. We had the option of taking a bus from Lilongwe to Mzuzu, our ministry site, but we decided to have our host pick us up because it was going to be easier, quicker, and a more pleasant ride. Our hosts truck broke down hallway to Mzuzu, his clutch went out, so we tied his truck to his friends truck and got towed. His friends truck kept overheating. We stopped quite a bit due to the overheating and due to the fact that the rope kept breaking.
Now, that was not all. During this whole expedition I started to feel pretty sick. I felt nauseous and I felt like I had to poop very bad. I operated under the law of the race at that point, “never trust a fart,” and I held it. Now this trip that was supposed to take around 4 hours turned into an 11 hour trip. ELEVEN HOURS. I had to poop around hour 7. Needless to say, I could not hold it the whole time, so around 11:00 pm I decided it was time. We stopped to let Collin’s, our host’s friend, truck cool down, and I grabbed a roll of toilet paper. I trekked about 50 yards away from the trucks, and on a beautiful Malawian night I crapped on the side of the road. We arrived at our ministry site at around 1:00 am. See, not funny in the moment, definitely funny now though.
Now let’s go to the morning after. All three of us guys went to the hospital. Every single one of us had stomach issues and needed to go, and all three of us came home with meds that day. Satan was really trying to ruin our fun, but we didn’t let him. Honestly there’s not too many options at that moment, you can either make the best of it, or you can be horribly miserable. We decided to make a joke out of it. It’s pretty easy to laugh at the fact that all three of us had the runs. It’s also really great when you realize that, even though there’s only one bathroom, somehow none of us had to wait to use it.
Let us now go to our first off day. We decided to go to Nkhata Bay and stay at a hostel called Mayoka Village. This place was gorgeous. Seriously, you get there and immediately you can see the lake and some of the mountains in the background. We all stayed in the dorm and it was amazing. The day we got there we just relaxed, I took a hot shower, it was amazing. We saw that they had a free canoeing/snorkeling trip the next day. You canoe a couple miles to this rock and then snorkel there, it was a 10:00 am-12:00 pm trip, only 2 hours. We decided that that sounded pretty good, so we signed up.
The next day we saddled up and got ready to go. It was me, Katherine, Rebekah, Leslie, and Haley, plus the guide whose name was Sunny. It was actually a really great trip out to the rock. Katherine, Haley, and I were in a canoe while Rebekah, Leslie, and Sunny were in the other. Now our canoe had a pretty good rhythm. We actually managed to go pretty much where we wanted to, zigzagging a minimal amount. Sunny’s canoe on the other hand did the serpentine the ENTIRE way there. We had a great time looking back and very time seeing their canoe going completely sideways, and each time we looked back they were going the opposite way as before. It was quite the adventure just getting there.
So we got there, and we beached our canoe, on purpose of course, and pulled it up so it wouldn’t float away. However, as we beach our canoe we hear a sound and look back to see that Sunny’s canoe had capsized approximately a half a foot away from shore. Again, we had a good laugh. The other canoe got settled though, pulled up to shore, emptied out of water, all that stuff, and Sunny got out the snorkels.
So a few of us start swimming out to the rock. About a third of the way there I was tired and struggling, however, I wasn’t willing to give up, so I kept going. While I went I prayed very hard that there would be a rock to stand on out there so that I did’t drown. God did not forsake me. Katherine and I were the only two that kept going, Rebekah and Leslie had turned back, and Haley was not quite to the rock yet. Katherine and I found a rock that was big enough to somewhat support both of us, which was really great because at that time I was about ready to give up and let the ocean have me. So we stood on this rock, somewhat dying, getting hit off of it by waves every 30 seconds, and laughing about how if it hadn’t been there we wouldn’t be here. Haley showed up a minute later and stood there as well, which worked extremely poorly considering that in reality it wasn’t even a one person rock.
After catching our breath, as much as we could, I decided I had enough energy to swim to another rock that was about 15 feet away without sinking. We decided that we should have swam to that one first. It was extremely large and flat, and it probably could have fit 20 people with a little room to spare, not to mention that we didn’t get hit by waves every 30 seconds. We swam around some, looked at fish, and then we decided that we would go back to shore and head back to the hostel.
The way back was just like the way there, we went pretty straight while the other canoe zigzagged the entire way back. We arrived at the hostel about 10 minutes before the other canoe. Over all it was a good experience. We got to canoe, snorkel, almost drown, and laugh at the other canoe. That’s a win in my book.
So far those have probably been the most noteworthy stories, but alongside those God has been doing some amazing stuff in my life. He’s really been revealing a lot of stuff and growing me. I’m gonna make another post about all of that, because it’s kind of a lot, and there’s already a lot in this post. So look out for the next post, it shouldn’t be too long ’til it’s up. As always, please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or wanna talk about what’s been going on so far on the race or this month or whatever. Thanks!
