Traveling from our All- Squad month in Ndola, Zambia, to our three different ministries in South Africa is a perfect example of having general travel plans, but being extremely flexible and having constantly changing plans.
Okay, so the original plan was to use the MMM bus to travel to Livingston on the 20th for two days, one for leadership development and the second for an adventure day at Victoria Falls. Then we would travel to the Botswana border, travel through Botswana to Gaborone, then travel over the border to Johannesburg, South Africa. We would then split into teams and travel to our three separate ministry sites by the end of the day on the 26th. We would buy our individual team bus tickets when we arrived in Johannesburg, because sometimes you can’t predict the arrival time of the buses.
Now for what actually ended up happening…
We left Ndola at 22:00 on Tuesday, September 20th. We picked up our second driver a bit later from his house. However, within an hour, the radiator had trouble circulating the water, to the engine overheated. We sat on the side of the road for another hour, as the four Zambians worked to cool the engine enough to drive again. This situation happened many times through throughout the night, and by the time we reached the outer edge of Lusaka, a 5-hour drive had become an 11-hour drive.
God also saved our lives that night. We were going quite fast down the highway with a truck behind us, and there was a truck coming at us. We needed to pull over, so our driver put his blinker on and started to pull over. The truck behind us honked and swerved quickly around us on the side of the road, pulling back in front of us. He missed us and the other truck in the process. Come to find out later, his brakes had given out and he was unable to stop!
In Lusaka, we had to wait around for three hours while the water circulation and radiator were fixed. During those seemingly endless hours, a gentleman walked up and started asking the usual questions. Where are you from? Why are you here? Do you like Zambia? Then he asked a new question: How do I become a Christian? Alyssa grabbed one of our hosts, and he grabbed a bible. We have a new brother today.
When we got back on the road around 12:00, we only traveled for about 15 minutes before we had overheating issues again. We ended up chilling at a convent in the area while the drivers worked on the bus. Around 17:00, our drivers fixed the bus enough to get us to the city bus station so we could get public transportation the rest of the way to Livingston.
Our public bus to Livingston was amazing! Great seats, air conditioning, and we were sitting next to each other, so we didn’t need to worry about others. We left Lusaka around 19:00, drove seven hours to Livingston arriving at 02:00 on Thursday. Our LDW host, Sanderson met us at the station and drove us to the mission house. We finally went to bed around 03:00.
We spent two days there in Livingston, one for leadership training and the other for adventure. Victoria Falls is beautiful!
From Livingston we traveled to the border with Botswana because there were free visas for the whole squad if we drove through there, instead of Zimbabwe. We all loaded onto a bus on Saturday morning around 09:30 in Livingston, and our packs all went into another vehicle. It took about an hour to get to the border from the mission house.
The border crossing was ridiculously complicated, but it didn’t take as long as expected. We had to do go through exiting passport control in Zambia, (which took 20 minutes), get on a ferry to cross the river (which took another 20 mins), then go through entrance customs in Botswana (this took about 30 minutes). However, the Zambian exiting passport control had stamped the wrong exit date on half of our passports! All of those people had to cross back over the river, get the date corrected, then come back to where we were waiting outside the Botswana border. This took another hour and a half. We then went to a bus station near the border to catch the bus to Gaborone, Botswana. We arrived at the station around 14:00 and the bus was leaving at 18:00. This allowed us to get some food and rest a bit.
The bus ride was 11.5 hours long, and we arrived in Gaborone at about 05:30 on Sunday. We then got another bus (essentially a private bus because of some awesome connections!) to Johannesburg. We crossed the next border at about 07:30. This total ride took another 5 hours, including stopping for breakfast, and we arrived at the Park Station in Joburg around 11:00 on Sunday.
Once in Joburg the teams split off, heading to their separate ministries for the month. My team, Rafiki, did not need to get on a bus until 23:00. That meant we had to wait around for about 12 hours there.
During our long wait, a rather drunk gentleman came and sat down with us. He said he had two kids he rarely sees and that he does have hardly any money. The entire time he was there I kept thinking, “God, this is your image gone horribly wrong. He needs your healing.”
Rafiki arrived in Durban, South Africa, around 07:00 on Monday, and we hung out for a few hours, and our host picked us up at 09:00. We drove about an hour to the village, and then slept for quite a while!
Here’s to an amazing tenth month!!
#GodIsInControl #redefiningdisciple
#THIRD
