Internet is painfully slow here... I've tried 4 times to upload photos and no luck. So this is gonna be long and photo-less so bear with me.
As I sit here on Sybil's couch in her comfortably quaint home typing up a word document to copy and paste, so many stories from the last few days come to mind. We have pretty limited internet access – we may try to head to the World Relief office here tomorrow morning, but other than that who knows... I miss giving updates.
Anyway. Last time I posted we were just leaving Sena... so let's pick up where we left off. We left Sena shortly after 9 am to catch a 2:20 flight out of Quelimane (heading to Maputo).... However, fifty kilometers down the road we hit a bump, and my dad started to hear a funky sound – so he told me to look out the window at the front right tire. And it's flat. So we explained to the driver in to pull over so we could begin the procedure of changing the spare. Luckily we had an experienced driver who knew where everything was in the truck. The only thing was, the spare had a chain wrapped around it and sealed with a solid cylinder shaped lock... which we had the key to – but there was so much dirt jammed up in the lock that we couldn't fit the key in. We tried everything – jiggling it around, soaking the key in water, breaking a coke bottle on a rock to make a makeshift cup to soak the lock in water, spraying toxic/poisonous heavy duty bug spray in the lock, sticking the dipstick with oil in the lock... (the list goes on) nothing worked. Meanwhile, time is passing. And we have a plane to catch. So David and our driver walked to the top of a nearby hill (we are literally in the middle of nowhere) to try and get cell service. Eventually they got ahold of Perpetua back at Kuwangisana and explained our situation. They sent a driver in the single cab with a spare tire in the back (because we couldn't get ours off the chassis), but he still wouldn't get to us for another half hour or so. Fortunately, not long thereafter a truck with two white South Africans behind the wheel passed us. How relieving it was to see a white face in all this mess. I flagged them down and they stopped to help... These people were well prepared. They had everything you could ever need if you were in any situation. It made sense cause we later found out that this couple had seen Africa in it's entirety below the equator. Wow. Fast forward a half hour and our spare had arrived. We changed it as quickly and efficiently as we could (we were really running out of time)- meanwhile David had been doing some calculations on the hood of the car with a map... and he confidently announced that we weren't going to make it. According to him we still had a good 300 kilometers from Caia to Quelimane, and we were still 20km outside of Caia. It was already about 5 till noon, and according to David we still had over 3 hours to go. After a quick huddle, we decided we would try our luck and head to Quelimane to try and catch our flight. David told our Mozambican driver that he would drive – and off we went. Long story short: David averaged a speed of about 130km/hour, we prayed and prayed the whole time for a late plane and that we would make this flight (if we missed it things would be extremely complicated – we had no means of communication with Sybil who was waiting at the airport, our time in Chokwe would be cut short, etc...), and by the Grace of God we made it to the airport at 2:03, breezed through security, checked our bags, and off we went. Not only that, but our plane was late:) By a solid half an hour... we didn't depart till after 3. Talk about an answer to prayer. David and Dad went up to the bar to celebrate with drinks (where we ran into the Scandinavian banker we had met at our hotel in Beira. Small world)– I just had a Fanta.
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