will I ever make it back to the village?

I'm sitting here writing this blog, while waiting for the giant truck we are trying to ride home to fill up with people, so we can make a go at attempt #3 to get back to the village!

One of the first things you get used to in Africa is waiting paitently for transport, sketchy, packed transport at that! My neighbor & I had our first crazy day of transport on Saturday, it was just too ironic & funny not to write a blog about. And forgive me if this doesn't seem as entertaining as it did to us, it might be a "you had to be there story", but here it goes:

There is a mission bus that goes back to our village, which we weren't quite sure where it left from or what time, just that it only leaves on Tuesdays & Saturdays. So we call a taxi to come pick us up from our house in town. Taxi says I'll be there in 10minutes, which we know means more like a half hour. So we wait for over an hour and the taxi finally arrives. When we get to the bus station, the people tell us we missed the bus by like 10minutes, but don't worry, there is a canter (large open bed truck) going to the village also that day. SO we pay our money, and the guy tells me he can even drop me right at my house which is 18km past the village they are going. At this point I was stoked, because its not often I will ever have transport right to my door. So what do I do, I go and buy a bunch of reed mats, because they are too big carry on my bike and now I have transport! The truck driver said we were leaving at 12 hours, so we load the truck, stuffed FULL of luggage and people, but that is typical. At 13hours they say we are leaving, so we take off, but only make it to the gas station, where they proceed to rotate all the tires on the truck. We are thinking, wow, what a late start we are getting, haha little did we know what the day held for us!
Finally we leave town at 14hours. It takes about 6 hours to get back to our houses, so that would put us home just after dark (which for us in Zambia is LATE). We get about 15km outside of town and the truck breaks down. So we all get off while the men tinker with something under the hood. They say its fixed and we get back on and go another 2 minutes or so and guess what, the truck breaks again. So we spend about an hour waiting while someone drives from town to come and fix the truck. They say again, don't worry its been fixed, so we all cram back on the truck and give it another go, but lo & behold, we break again. At this point my friend and I are thinking, surely we will just drive back to town, since we are still so close and its almost dark, but NO they still think we can make it 300km on a broken truck.
The icing on the cake was that behind us, and moving towards us, is a GIGANTIC storm, and here we are with all of our luggage, trying to hitch back into town, into this giant downpour. So we jump on the back of another openbed truck heading back into town, kind of mad because the other guys didn't give us a refund, but happy to be getting back to town.
Then the downpour begins, lucky for us they had a giant tarp that we held up over the 20 of us in the back of this truck. But because the rain was SO heavy, the tarp was going wild, and just smacking up and down on our heads, at least we were dry though. It felt like we were being smuggled over a border or something, really was quite hilarious!
SO finally we make it back into town, lugging all of this heavy stuff around and try to find a taxi to take us back to the Peace Corps house. Most of the taxis are telling us NO because it is way too muddy, but finally we find one who consents. WEll sure enough the taxi gets stuck about halfway back to the house, so we are stuck walking in shin high mud home, with me carrying 3 large reed mats on my head, a huge backpack on my back, and a wood chair in one hand, and barefoot! I only fell about 3 times and was only about half covered in mud.
But just as we are almost home, my friend that I'm with says to me "Tamra, you know would would make this day even more funny..."and AS he says that he just bites it face first into the mud with all of his luggage! He wasn't really a happy camper in the end. But what can you do other than laugh it off and think...only in Africa!

I tell this story only to give a little taste of the fun of traveling in rural Africa. It is kind of fun because you never know what to expect and you just have to go with the flow...so what if you make it home maybe 5 days late...at least you made it!

Now I am going to give it a try for the 3rd time!Wish me luck!