I chose carefully which side of the rift to perch the car on in our descent. Some holes in the road are best tackled by going directly through, others by trying to straddle with the car wheels, and others by avoiding all together. I apologized to my riders as we bounced over the ruts, rifts, holes, and dry streams like hyper children at a party. I plunged into the ditch, to avoid a pile of dirt and rubble that had been dumped in the middle of the road for a future road-repair project, and emerged victorious on the other side.
I squinted at the cow path and glanced at my companion. She nodded nonchalantly, pointing with pouty lips to a tree, no… to a rock, no… to the goat?
“So I go there?” I asked, just to clarify. Babra nodded. I swallowed. “Does she remember that we are in a vehicle?” I thought to myself. I dove in, trusting that some other car must have done this in the past. I cringed as the branches scraped along the roof and sides of the van. We emerged into a circle of huts. Relief to be in an open space with clean-swept, hard packed dirt underneath our wheels was quickly replaced by concern that a car was perhaps not supposed to be in someone’s home.
Babra was unconcerned and pointed to a fence. From the open car window, she greeted the mzee who was relaxing under his tree. He grunted his appreciation for the polite greeting. She pointed again to the fence. I saw an opening. An opening that was just the width of my van. An opening threatened by a piece of barbed wire on one side and a solid tree on the other side. I scooted the van around through various non-skilled maneuvers in order to approach the opening as directly as possible without using a hut as a launching pad. Feeling like a wimp, I finally asked Babra to jump out and pull the barbed wire out of the way. She complied and gave the fence post a complimentary tug as the van did its part in shoving it aside. I plunged in.
A lady carrying wood as big as multiple small trees on her head detoured off the cow path into the tall grass between two trees to let us pass. I smiled and greeted, hardly daring to take my eyes off the path, let alone lift a hand off the wheel to wave.
We emerged into another homestead. I focused so hard on not running into children, chickens, and goats, that I only later realized that I passed under a low clothesline to my parking spot. I was eager for this journey to end, so I jumped out, pulled a collapsible wheelchair out of the back of the van and left the one year old and two four year olds in the back seat briefly to go get Stephen. We found Stephen sitting in the front of his auntie’s home and, in my eagerness to retrace my steps (I was nervous that I would not figure out how to turn the van around), I loaded him into the van more quickly than a mzungu should.
We waited some minutes until Babra returned to the van and we were off again. I took out someone’s clean laundry (sorry!) and a stump (sorry car!), but succeeded in not scraping the bottom of the car at a point in the road that neither Josh nor I had succeeded in the past.
When we finally got back to Home of Love, Stephen’s beaming smile was reward enough as the children called his name and eagerly waited for me to open the door. I pulled out the wheelchair, lifted Stephen out of the van and he was wisked away before I could even settle him properly in the chair. I had a better understanding of why Stephen, with spina bifida, was left at home every day all day when I thought of the time, energy, fuel, and car damage that had gone into this trip just to bring Stephen to play with his friends. I prayed that this small act of love would show him Jesus’ love.
Comments