So this evening, a group of us decided to go off ship and get us some pizza (brick oven pizza, no less... in Africa). We piled into one of the Mercy Ships jeeps-- thankfully we had an approved driver with us so we didn't have to walk out to the gates in the rain for a taxi-- and we headed off to the beach road. It had literally been raining all day today, but it slowed down to a drizzle around 4 PM, and I'd gone out earlier afternoon and at the time, the roads weren't all too bad. But by evening, the beach road-- the main road that goes along the coastline-- was in terrible shape. They've been doing some major construction on the beach road for the last month now, but right now it's still just dirt and sand, which- surprise surprise- transforms into mud and muddy sand in the rain. The road was completely congested with almost stand-still traffic, as cars were getting stuck in the mud. Because the stuck cars couldn't move, the other cars couldn't move forward. After 20 minutes, we passed Seaman's mission, which is literally right outside the port; at this rate, we figured the 15 minute ride to the pizza place would take over 2 hours. Jeff, the driver, and I had to be back by 7 PM for a music thing back on the ship, so we decided to abandon our pizza plans and head back for dinner on the ship.This is where it gets interesting: Jeff makes a huge U-turn on the beach road, and of course, with our luck, our jeep slides into a deep puddle of mud-- and we got stuck! None of us in the group are prone to undue panicking (you know who those people are), so none of us were really panicking or anything about the fact that we were stuck on the side of the road and couldn't get the car to move, but I will admit that I immediately thought to myself, "Oh crap, we're going to get all muddy aren't we?" But while Jeff kept accelerating and shifting gears to try to get the car out of the mud, a random man came running up to us all of a sudden, waving his arms, telling us in hurried French to stop pushing the pedal. He yelled and waived over a bunch of other African men, and they started digging out the sand from underneath our back wheels-- with their bare hands.
After about 2 minutes of furious digging, the man tapped on our window and yelled at us to try again-- and it worked! Hallelujah, out of the mud we went. They did ask for money as we left (this is Africa, after all), but still, I just thought that the entire experience was such an example of some major cultural divide-- where in the U.S. could you find a group of random strangers who'll push your car out of the mud, without even having been asked? Johan explained later that this is basically what those men do all day during the rainy season- stand by the road and help push out stuck cars- because that's what happens when you mix sand roads and tiny beat-up secondhand cars (or in this case, a large, Mercy Ships jeep) and torrential rain. The picture above is Jeff with the muddy jeep after we'd gotten back to the ship-- the photo doesn't show it very well, but trust me, it was pretty dirty.In any case, we finally got back to the ship after our mini-adventure-- sad about the pizza, only to be greeted by a hamburger and fries dinner back on the ship. While I was eating my delicious hamburger, I couldn't help but think of what a friend said after I invited him to pizza. He was completely dismayed that we would even think of skipping hamburger night; he looked at me with this odd look and said, ".. but it's hamburger night. Why would you go get pizza.. in Africa.. when it's hamburger night??"
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