I wipe the back of my neck and feel grittiness from the sand and sweat that has been there since we’ve arrived in Mozambique. Thanks humidity. I stand in line to board the crowded bus. No air conditioning. Seats just large enough for one and half butt cheeks with handles on the back of every chair. We all get stares and looks as we pile on. The man yells something at me as I look for a place overhead for my things and then he takes my guitar. I say a prayer it is safe with our stack of other bags packed tightly in the compartment underneath us. We all find a seat. So much for assigned numbers. They don’t really follow the rules here anyway so not sure why I am surprised. I guess if the bus crashes, we won’t be in these seats anyway. My seat was in the middle between a local guy, Alberto, who spoke no English and my teammate, Christi. Alberto smelled of a mixture of things; smoke, body odor and sour cheese. But he had a nice smile and would crack the window when I asked. He even picked up my water bottle once when I dropped it.
Very shortly into the bus ride did I realize why every single seat had a handle on the back of it. They drive these buses like they are in the Daytona 500. It’s your safety handle so you don’t go flying across the bus when they dart and slam on their brakes and swerve to miss the potholes the size of a small car. Yes, my handle and I were close friends for nearly 26 hours. We knew the ride would be long, that wasn’t a surprise. But it was s surprise at just how much of a spectacle we have become since being in this country. Everyone stared, everywhere we went. There weren’t stops at a gas station or any place with a bathroom….the ditch was our toilet for the ride. So, just like we were some kind of newly arrived pet at the zoo or something, people even stared at us while we peed, maybe even with more intensity. So thankful for the capulana (serong-type skirt) I bought this month as a gift for a friend of mine which worked as a great curtain (don’t worry, I’ve already washed it). I thought of all the times I would take my dog for a walk and stare at her while she peed. So sorry, Irving. It really does suck.
We probably had only a handful of pit stops along the way. At each place, there would be people coming up to the windows to sell you anything from cashews, French fries, bread, water, pineapples, and onions to necklaces and flour jars and some other weird wooden contraption I couldn’t understand. This was how they made their living; selling nuts to strangers before the other person could get to them. It reminded me of a baseball game, “Peanuts, get your peanuts.” We would pile back on the bus, the locals pushing and being more persistent than we white, fragile Americans are used to, and just before you actually sat down, the bus took off. And away we went again, racing through the dessert on a quest to break the record of the last bus that drove to Maputo. And as we sped along, I saw so many things through Alberto’s window. More mud houses with palm trees for rooftops like we had in the village where we had lived for the month. Looking at them, I remembered the people I met during our time in Nimonyo who lived in exactly the same kind of house. I remember the thought I had driving into Mozambique and that I would like to learn how to make one, and I got to during our stay! I saw people carrying twice their weight in wood that was also about three times their height…on their head. Mothers with babies on the side of the highway, just inches from being road kill. Then there were the buses on the side of the road, burned to a crisp. Ones just like ours, which I came to call Dale (for Dale Eirnheart) and these buses seemed to be warnings of what dangers there are in taking risks like this one. But on this bus ride in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, I was thankful for just how alive the risk made me feel.
I started (and finished) a book by Donald Miller while riding in the back of this bulldozer of a bus. It’s called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and it’s about story. How we all have our own story to make and whether we sit on the couch and watch TV or get out and go camping in the Himalayas, all of it comes together to make our story. And this crazy bus ride is now a part of mine. The seat hurt my bum, a lot, and I had more bug bites on one ankle alone than I had all month combined; ankles which were swollen to to twice their size with no definable ankle bone, reminding me of an elephant’s leg. I was sweaty and I felt grimy, the smells were unreal and sleeping was touch and go. But the breeze never felt so good on my face and blowing through my greasy hair; peanut butter with cornflakes never tasted (or smelled) so good; a book never was more valued as it was on that bus to keep me from focusing on just how much could go wrong. Brushing my teeth had never made me feel so clean, standing up never had so much joy to it, and praying had never been more constant in my life as it was during that bus ride. In a lot of ways, the risk and the danger of it brought more life.
Not all of our lives can be some grand Jack Caruack adventure. But we all get ONE life to live. One life to make choices that will turn into a story that will cause us to look back and hopefully say there is nothing we missed out on. But I don’t care so much about my story for my sake. I simply want a life lived with no regrets and one that continues with a dot dot dot even after I am gone; a life with a legacy, pointing to an eternal God whom I lived it for.
Maybe you won’t have such an incredible, life threatening bus ride to help you value your life with more fervor, but my hope is for you to go and find your crazy bus ride; go do something that evokes a sense of fear and danger and truly LIVE. Make a story out of your life. You can’t write your own story just by reading someone else’s. But, sometimes in reading someone else’s story, we are inspired to live ours better. So go! Do the thing.
(Also, I wrote this before riding in Asia. The bus rides in India are even more terrifying, with bumpier, much curvier roads, and people in India stare with even more intensity than Africa. Several close calls; that moment you realize the driver of the car coming towards you (in your lane to avoid the slow moving tut tut) is just as insane as the one driving your bus and the gap between your vehicles is closing. #Indian game of chicken….way more terrifying. But man, never felt so alive!)
