Two days ago I returned from my first trip to the International Gospel Lectureship.  The lectureship is held every year in a different southern African country.  It is a time when Christians from the different countries can come together to know each other and grow in knowledge by attending various classes.  This year the event was held in Manzini, Swaziland.  In the first e-mail I will discuss the logistics of getting there and back.  In the second e-mail I will describe the event itself.   

The group traveled in two buses, one from Lilongwe and the other from Blantyre.  The two buses met on the other side of the border and traveled the 1200 miles south together.  Each bus had around 15 people on board.  I was relieved to see that our drivers were safe and not willing to take chances.  On the Blantyre bus we had two drivers who switched off driving night and day for the grueling 39 hours from Blantyre to Manzini.  Malawians believe that if you have a radio, you should use it and use it to the max, so for almost all of the 39 hours five or six songs blasted from our buses speakers over and over and over.  Despite the music, I was able to fellowship with the folks on board and get to make several new friends. 

If you look at a map, you can see that between Swaziland and Malawi lies one huge country, the nation of Mozambique.  So for the overwhelming majority of hours we were in that country.  Some of the roads were among the best in the world, freshly paved with reflectors embedded into the pavement for safety and ease of travel at night.  Many other stretches of the road were potholed and not level, forcing us to reduce our speed drastically to avoid doing major damage to our bus.  We also discovered that fuel can be hard to come by in Mozambique.  Communities with fueling stations are few and far between in Mozambique's vast undeveloped interior and at night even the few stations that exist close down.  Fortunately, we had several drums of fuel with us.  

It was this spare fuel that we were carrying, though, that nearly stranded us in a  wilderness area somewhere south of the Zambezi River in one of the most desolate areas we crossed.  About midnight we stopped to refuel from the containers that we had and the young men refueling our vehicle mistakenly mixed up a container of water with the diesel containers and poured several gallons of water into our tank.  As soon as they realized what had happened, our driver thought quickly and drained all of the contents of the tank onto the ground.  Thankfully, none of the water had been pumped into the engine.  But now we had been forced to dispose of a quarter of a tank of good fuel that had been remaining in the tank.  We poured the remaining containers of fuel into the bus and set out, wondering if our depleted supply of diesel would get us to the next fuel station.  Some time just after dawn the answer came; the driver called out that the fuel gauge now read Empty.  We managed to make it a few miles further to a crossroads but there was NO fuel station there.  A policeman told us it was 40 more miles to the next fuel station, a distance we could never make with our empty tank. 

Then the Lord intervened.   

As we stopped beside the road, we spotted some young men, who obviously were interested in selling us whatever we needed.  As soon as we asked them for fuel, one ran off behind some buildings and within five minutes, he was emptying a five-gallon container of diesel into our tank.  When payment time came it became clear that these sales people were unscrupulous and trying to extort way too much money from us.  We haggled some with them, but left paying much more than the fuel was worth.  Still we weren't complaining.  Now we had enough fuel to get us to a proper filling station where we could buy enough to get home.  I think the Lord used this period of our travel to teach us to rely on him more fully.  Throughout those stressful hours we had been praying that the Lord would spare us being stranded out there; upon deliverance from the real possibility of being stranded so far out in the middle of nowhere we thanked the Lord as a group for his blessing. 

Mozambique presented other difficulties for travel as well.  At the border posts we were forced to pay fees that we had not been expected.  We found a kind of corruption among Mozambican authorities that doesn't exist in Malawi.  The border police even threatened to hold us for two to three days if we did not pay them extra money.  It was good to finally get back to Malawi!