Last Weekend...

After a 4 ½ -hour bus ride, we spent 2 hours at a dim clinic playing thumb wars with kids and dodging racial comments while waiting for our turn for outreach immunizations. At 4pm we finally headed up the narrow mountain road as far as our bus driver dared to carry us. It takes tremendous skill and guts to drive the road through those mountain villages with blind turns and drop-offs and potholes and crazy drivers. Most of the people who drive there disconnect their speedometers so they can claim that it’s “broken” and get out of speeding tickets.

Steve gave the final back-out option, pointing to the dark clouds overhead before we loaded off the bus and onto the dirt path near the river bed. And upward we trotted as the rain came down. Night fell on us within an hour.

It was a grueling four-something hours with hardly any stops until the ranger’s station at Portland Gap and it’s a good thing it was too dark to see the incline of the trail. No wonder my legs were screaming at me half way up. We reached the ranger’s station sometime in the night and crashed on the bunks until the dreaded alarm woke us up at 2:30 in the morning. More uphill.

And it was all worth it for this…

Lisa & Em (she's on the Gambia team)

Em & Shane (he's on The Gambia team, too).Then down amidst the coffee-growing slopes in daylight. We met some guys from Vancouver who were as high as a kite. We purchased coffee while they bought marijuana, the other thing Blue Mountain is famous for, great weed. Later, we met a Rastafarian who insisted that George Bush is the devil.

The trip was exhausting yet rejuvenating and thankfully just what I needed. I still feel I am in my element when I’m hiking. I see God’s might in a mountain and His tenderness in a flower. It was a sweet time to bond with the students who came. Every once in a while I remember that I’m like 5 years older than most of them and then I think, “Hmm. Weird.”