Saturday Afternoon November 26, 2011
After a week of sheer bliss where I could pull my car into any gas station without a waiting line and say fill her up ,it stopped. For the past week there was no fuel to be found. Every day I would walk with my gas can trying to find fuel only to be told not today. Finally my friend Blessings( the one wearing the triditional head dressing) told me if I would buy his diesel he would take me to see the progress. So off we went in his four wheel drive truck in which we would later need. It had come a pretty good storm the night before so the ground was standing in water in the low lands. As we came close to the place we were to pick up Lester we encountered a huge tree that had been blown over covering the road. Too big to move, we decided to drive around it. Big mistake! We sank all four tires in the mud. Hopelessly stuck we tried to free ourselves of this offering that reached upward and engulfed our truck. Finally two men walked from the muddy fields to our rescue. They looked at our dilemma and started talking to each other. As one walked back to the fields to retrieve his hoe the other started to break off limbs from the downed tree. As they dug out the holes, the tires had made and leveled the ground the other began making a path under the tires with the broken branches. I wasn’t much help until it came time to push. We crawled a few feet than sank again. I called Lester and told him our predicament and he said he was own his way. More digging and more branches until finally after about forty five minutes we were free. The two barefooted muddy men were thanked with a five hundred MK bill each and walked back to their fields. There were others just standing around watching while we worked and when I handed out the two bills they all came forward with there hands held out! Lester arrived on his bycycle just about the time we became free. He gave his bike to someone there to ride as he climbed into the truck. He knew another route we could take and guided us around the fallen tree.We arrived at the site sometime after four. I took these photos and gave him the money to buy more bricks, pay the men and buy more cement. The work will be continued on Monday. By the time Blessing and myself hit the main road heading home it was dark. I don’t know which was the scarrier event the abiss of mud or the driving at night in Africa!