There and Back Again

This is the story of my adventures getting to and from Africa this summer and how God encouraged me to walk by faith not by sight.

There

OK, it all starts with a desire to do a missionary internship. I decide to go to Africa with a program at my school called Global Outreach. I am told I can go to Mozambique. I say, "Sure where is it?"

A team forms, dissolves, and forms again a couple months before we leave: Sam, Crystal, Michael, and Aaron. We have no clear idea about the internship: what we will do, where we will live, what we will eat. A leap of faith for us.

In the meetings, it seems as though we are the exception to the rules. We will not actually apply for visas until we get there. We have disconnected flight itineraries. Our entire team is not actually at Harding, so we barely know each other. We have only met altogether once or twice. The missionaries we will be staying with have never had interns before. We have to leave May 15th, right after school ends, and won't get back until late into the summer. "Of course, this is how it would have to be," I tell myself, "If I were to ever go on an internship in Africa, I would barely know what would happen from one day to the next."

Then things start to get interesting.

A couple weeks before we leave, we find out that we have to fly on the 14th instead of the 15th. Then a few days later it turns into the 13th. We're talking about leaving the country the day after graduation. Kinda tough on some of us with finals and the end of school and everything all packed in, but we just adjust our schedules as best as we can.

Let me pause and go back. A couple months before we leave, we talk to the missionaries about each of us taking a 50 pound bag of supplies and stuff to them. No big deal because we can have two fifty-pound bags and a carry-on. But that's alright because we can get by with 50 pounds of stuff for a summer.
A week before we leave, we are informed that we can only carry 66 pounds of luggage in total, after we have already accepted the missionaries luggage. Two days before we leave, as I am about to leave to get on a plane to Iowa, one of the administrators casually mentions that the weight limit is 44 pounds per person. Awesome. We each get negative 6 pounds of luggage.

For the journey, we are given $2500 in cash. Although this was very exciting to hear initially, it turned out to be not so good. We have to purchase plane tickets and visas while we are in Tanzania for a separate flight itinerary, in order to make it all the way to Mozambique. This wouldn't be so bad by itself. Unfortunately, we have to sleep overnight in a Tanzanian airport - because we have no visas to get into that country.
It's two in the morning. I am about to sleep for about 45 minutes - all the sleep I will get for the night. I pray for safety, since I have $2500 strapped to my body, in the middle of the night in an African airport terminal. In the morning, we are taken through customs, get our tickets, go onto Tanzanian soil without visas, all with no hassle after we pay one of the airport workers $20 because he's our 'friend'. About two days after we left the States, we finally arrive in Mozambique.


And Back Again

A week before we fly back to the States, one of the missionaries calls to confirm his flights to his family in Tanzania. The airline informs him that their flights are no longer running. They are all canceled. It just so happens that this is the same African airline that we plan(ned) on flying with. In a week. A few days later we are informed by Global Outreach that our flights out of Mozambique have been canceled. Thanks for the heads up.

All of us interns have different flights once we get to Zurich, one of our stop-overs. Aaron and Crystal really need to make their flights, because they are both flying to foreign countries with their families shortly after we are supposed to get back to the U.S. The rest of our itinerary stays the same, except for the crucial first flight, which means we would miss all the other ones if we don't make it to Tanzania on time. We frantically contact another airline who has flights on July 5th and 7th. We are supposed to leave on the 6th. A problem. Plus, we don't even know if we can get tickets yet. Meanwhile, we go to the beach, because there is nothing we can do.

We find out eventually that they have one ticket. We draw straws. OK, not really. We give it to Aaron because he has to leave the soonest after he gets back to the States. The rest of us will leave on the 7th and just try and deal with missed flights as best as we can. We escort him to the airport, all taking our luggage with the faint hope that we can go. We all get on the plane that day.

We land in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania and ask to get on standby for the first flight to Zurich. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as standby in this airport without a fee. We have almost no more traveling money at this point. Instead we call the parents of one of the missionaries we stayed with in Mozambique, who just so happens to live in Dar. And they just so happen to be hosting another intern group from our school. We pay for visas to get into the country and stay with them. We leave the next day, but first we decide to go to a 4th of July party that will be held at the American Embassy on the 6th of July. Why was it on that day? I don't know.

We get stuck in traffic coming back from the party as we try to get to the airport. I believe you should check-in two hours before the flight leaves on international flights. We come racing into the gate maybe 30 minutes before take-off.

Finally, we are all on the plane, back on track. We're going home . . . almost.

That is everyone but myself is back on track.

Unfortunately, there was a mix-up back when the African airline canceled their flights. For some reason, my ticket got scheduled to leave from Zurich on two different days by someone (I still haven't found out who), and neither day was confirmed. So as I hand the airline agent my itinerary, they hand it back with a smile and say, " I'm sorry, you can't go. Someone messed up just your ticket. You can't leave until the 11th." We got into Zurich on 07-07-07. Seven is my lucky number.

So I stay in Zurich. Not too bad. Two other interns planned to be there for a few days, so they'll be with me. Unfortunately, we get there right in the middle of Zurich Fest (aka Beer Fest). Hundreds of outdoor pubs, concerts, restaurants, you name it. Thousands of people cramming into the streets of Old Zurich, a small part of the city where everything is concentrated. And we can't find a single room, except for one small hotel above a bar right in the middle of Zurich Fest.Rock music and throngs of people surround permeate our street until 4 am. By the way, it only happens every 4 years for 3 days in the summer. And we just so happen to get there in the middle of it. Just our luck. ( By the way, the hotel manager looked and sounded exactly liked the landlord from SpiderMan 2 & 3, for all you fans out there)

We decide to head out to find a church for the next day, after a full day of obtaining a place to sleep and food. We start at about 11 pm, finding all the crosses depicted on our map, which represent churches. After an hour and a half of going to these place on various buses and trams and rails in a city none of us have ever been in before, we give up on trying to find an English-speaking one. As we wait at a bus stop to go back to the hotel, I ask a random old couple, I'm talking 70's or 80's who just so happen to be out at 12:30 am, if they know of any churches. They do. The one English speaking church. And they can show us on our map. We thank them and board the bus to finally go back to the room for some much needed sleep. It is now 1 in the morning.

But wait. Public transportation is now shut down along the border of Zurich Fest. Where our hotel is smack dab in the middle of. We have to go, on foot, several blocks, through hundreds of thousands of people, all packed into tiny cobblestone streets, drinking like all the alcohol in the world will magically disappear in the morning, with bands on every corner blasting music. On our first day ever in Zurich. With only a map in German. And mad riots in the streets. And dodging bullets. Ok, I exaggerated a little bit. About the map being in German. But seriously, we were so thankful to finally get to our room that night.

We go to church the next morning and find we have connections with some of the people at this church in Zurich, and they offer us a free room for later.


I finally get on a plane and go home, with only a 3 hour delay and 5 gate changes in Dallas due to thunderstorms. A mere 6 or 7 days after I left Mozambique, I make it back to Iowa.

Looking back on my travel experience, I don't see a disaster, even though it might be interpreted as one. Instead of seeing where things got screwed up and how unreliable people and flights and weather were, I see where God was the only thing I could count on. Going to Africa, I had no clue what I would be doing. But I knew that God would let everything work out and take care of me. Even in an African airport in the middle of the night. And everything went wrong trying to get back home, it wasn't by chance that we all just so happened to get on a flight that would get us to Tanzania, or that we just so happened to know of someone in Tanzania who would take care of us, or that we just so happened to meet a couple at a bus stop in the middle of the night who knew of the one English-speaking church in Zurich where we would encounter Christian hospitality, or that nothing bad happened to us while we were in Zurich during the biggest partying it would see in four years.

Honestly, I am not bitter about anything that went wrong during the trip. Of course things would go wrong and we wouldn't know what to expect from one day to the next. I would highly encourage people to do internships even like the one I went on, because part of the experience is just trusting God. When we decided to take a leap of faith at the start of the internship, we placed ourselves in God's hands. And He didn't betray the trust we put in Him.