Sudan the adventures

So this past week, I was in Sudan to help Pastor Dongo as he went there to minister to some pastors and church leaders. I wasn't too excited about the trip considering that I am soon going home and have lots of work to accomplish here in Uganda before returning home for a somewhat long visit.

We left very early Monday morning and experienced just the beginning of some transportation challenges for the week. We were flying on a fairly small airplane from Africa Inland Mission that day. As we went for take off, the pilot decided to not take off. He didn't say anything to us at first, just taxied back to the terminal. Later, he told us that there was a problem with the wind speed indicator. After about an hour and a half of phone calls and working to fix the problem, he said it was fixed. We went for takeoff and had no problems the rest of the way. At this point, I had been informed on very little about our trip to Sudan. I learned that we were landing at a place called Torit. It is in the Eastern Equatoria state of Sudan which borders Northern Uganda. We landed safely on a somewhat sketchy dirt runway with some strategically placed potholes.

The next step was to get to Magwi from Torit. The drive was supposed to be about 2 hours. Not too far right? I think the distance was something like 36 km. Do you get the picture? We were lucky to have a Land Cruiser to manage the potholes and large puddles (what else can you call those things...not potholes, but small ponds?) A little more than halfway, the driver tried to make a maneuver around one of these pools only to find the mud give way and he slipped back into the pool. However, we managed not to get stuck there. A short while after, we came upon a convoy of UN vehicles as one had gotten stuck in one of those pools. We waited and watched for about 30 minutes as they tried unsuccessfully to pull the vehicle out. Finally, they let us pass their convoy, but about 10 minutes later, our car also broke down (not in a pool though). We sat and waited as the driver attempted to fix it and call for help. The pastor who was hosting us ended up walking to the next village and catching a boda boda to Magwi where he found some mechanics who arrived about an hour later with 3 bodas to take us to town. So the rest of our trip was on boda to town without our luggage as we waited for the car to make it the rest of the way.

A few days later, we got a different car to take us to a few towns in the area to visit their health care facilities. The car was a sketchy Rav4 with the tires almost completely bald in some cases. We noticed that the driver kept watching one tire specifically. Lo and behold on the way back, we got a flat tire. As if that wasn't enough, it almost immediately began to rain like cats and dogs.

Finally, today, we returned on the smallest plane possible I think. It was not a smooth ride...let's just say I'm glad my stomach wasn't full at the beginning or else it would have been trouble. So needless to say, we had a few interesting transportation adventures in our short week in Sudan. Oh yeah...we did ministry also...I'll write separately about that later.