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Published: January 31st 2006
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Pretty and Green
Run!... The clouds are coming to drown you! The day started off pretty normal. Our original plans got cancelled because it was raining to hard in that area, so it would be unlikely that any of the farmers would show up to the meeting. So we decided to go try and meet some people living in the opposite direction. We didn’t leave until two hours after we had originally planned, but who’s counting? After driving for an hour we found out that the first person we wanted to meet was actually back in Choma for the day. So we continued out to the villages in the hopes that some of the people we wanted to meet would be around. After another half hour of driving we came to the farm of someone Joshua and Enock knew from their previous job, and we wanted him to come with us so he could show us where the other two farmers we wanted to visit lived. He wasn’t at his house, but his wife said he was on his way and should be home in ten minutes.
Forty five minutes later he still hasn’t shown up so we decide to just keep going. As we come around the first corner we
Row row row your boat...
... gently down the road nearly run the farmer we were looking for over as he is flying down the road on his bicycle. So now we are set and head off to try and meet the first farmer. When we reach her farm, we find that she has also gone back to Choma for the day.
Back in the truck again, we head off to see if we can have any luck with the last farmer. After a couple wrong turns, we get headed in the right direction… which is down a path that would be narrow to do on a motorbike, let alone a land cruiser. As we are following this path, I notice how striking the scenery is. The sun is shining quite brightly, everything is really green, but in the background are some of the blackest clouds I have ever seen. When we get to the farm, our luck has improved and the farmer we want to meet with is actually there. The meeting goes really well, he is interested in the cotton intervention, and immediately sets a meeting date for us to come back and talk to all the farmers he supports. Just as we finish up, the first
big drops of rain start falling. None of us take it to seriously, it’s the rainy season after all, it’s supposed to rain.
Less than five minutes later, we know better. I have never seen rain like this before. Water is sheeting down the windshield. No matter how slow we go the wipers can’t keep the water off the window long enough to get a clear view. The surrounding fields have turned into swamps, and the road is rapidly becoming a river. And when I say river, I don’t mean there was water running down the road, I mean that there was rapids forming. It was crazy.
After backtracking almost all the way back to the first town, we come to a low-lying bridge, and it has about a foot of water rushing over the top of it. We get out to take a closer look and try and decide if we should chance it. In the five minutes we spend standing around looking at it, the water comes up another three or four inches. We back the car up out of what is rapidly becoming part of the river and then get out to take a look again. The water is definitely too high for us to try and drive over now, so we have two choices. One, we can sit and wait for the water to go back down. Two, we can try and go a back way around which will take an hour and a half extra, and there is no guarantee that it is possible. It’s 4:30, and it will be dark by 7:00. So if we are going to go the long way around, we need to start by 5:30 at the latest. After waiting for twenty minutes we decide the water is going down and we are just going to wait it out. At this point, people from the surrounding farms start showing up to look at the flood. They tell us they haven’t seen the water this high in ten years or more.
While we are standing there admiring the rapids and waiting for signs that the water is dropping faster we notice that the water is now running down one of the ruts in the road, and the line we had been using to see if the water is going down is beginning to fill up with water. It’s time to take the long way around. The long way consisted of driving through a chain of lakes and small rivers that used to be the road, and some really narrow goat track looking roads. We only got really stuck once. We had to jam a bunch of branches under the wheels to get traction, but we made it out all right. We finally got back to Choma at about 9:30 that night… and it hadn’t rained a drop there.
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