I went there with my friend Masir (who you may remember from my account of my epic trip to Kortembak) to visit his family. Masir is married with six kids, here is him with his family, in front of his house. Where they all live.
It's pretty small for a family of eight, I'm sure you'll agree. For the first time in ages I Was surprised by how basic his home was. they only had one chair, which I had the honour of sitting on for the duration of our visit.
We travelled there on saturday morning, spent the afternoon sitting around drinking coffee and talking Uduk (Masir's from the Uduk tribe...and I did more bemused listening rather than talking). I spent the night in the local pastors house, where he kindly gave up his bed and slept on the floor. Although to be honest, I'm not entirely convinced the floor might not have been more comfortable. During the night it rained heavily. This was a problem, and not only because pastor Solomon's roof leaked above my bed. I had a river to cross to get home and I was anxious that we may not be able to cross...
On Sunday, after church (and another sermon from yours truly, on ten minutes notice) and masses of food, we set off for home, braving the mudiest roads I had ever seen. We got slightly stuck a couple of times, but managed to free ourselves, before this happened:
In a hilarious twist of irony, we were stuck almost exactly where I got the puncture in the aforementioned trip to Kortembak. After a while of trying to get unstuck, I was beginning to get worried. Credit to Masir, he was getting stuck in digging with his bare hands, but I was fairly sure that wasnt gonna work, and so we set of for the nearest village (called Nila), to beg for help.
After recruiting a couple of guys from there, we were on our way again.
However, the remainder of the journey was not withour it;s anxiety. We left Doro with a full tank of petrol, but when we arrived we had less than half left, and there was no petrol for sale in Chali. or anywhere in between. As it happens, we did finally run out of petrol...about 5 minutes walk from home. Which was a massive relief. Here are Masir and I, looking relieved...
In other news, we still have the team from Scotland with us, and they have been a blessing to all and sundry...on the building site, we continue to progress, whilst simultaneously pushing the boundaries of health and safety practice. Here are Stu and I in one of the less extreme examples:
In more extreme (unphotographed) incidents, I nearly put a circular saw into my leg, and one of the other lads dropped a spinning angle grinder from above his head. But God continues to protect us...We've also had a (at times heated) football match agains the local lads, which ended in a tightly contested 1-1 draw. I think we're having a rematch tomorrow. I'll let you know how that goes...
No comments:
Post a Comment