Stranded on Munali Hill

We knew it would happen sooner or later. It was only a matter of time. Our time to be stranded by a vehicle breakdown happened Wednesday. We had taken Patson, one of the Zambian evangelists, into Lusaka to apply for a visa at the American Embassy. We had spent the Tuesday night in Lusaka so that we could be at the embassy before 8:00 a.m. The application and interview took two hours, and then there was grocery shopping to be done. We were ahead of schedule when we left Lusaka at 2:00 in the afternoon, confident that we had plenty of time to complete the five-hour trip before dark.

At 3:30 the battery light came on and the engine started overheating. We were on a narrow two-lane road in the hills of Kafue by then and began looking desperately for a place to pull off where we would also have cell phone service. We finally located a “lay-by” or additional lane added for passing and stopping. As soon as the Land Rover stopped, the unmistakable sound of steam hissing from the radiator hit our ears. Boiling water spewed onto the pavement and ran down the hill. Diagnosis: broken fan belt.

We called Kelly Hamby back at Namwianga. Just an hour earlier, two big yellow school buses from the Mission had passed us on their way into Lusaka, taking women to a three-day meeting. Kelly called the drivers and asked them to bring one of the buses and tow us back to Namwianga. That seemed like a good enough plan, so we settled down to wait for our rescue.

Patson pointed out that we were on Munali Hill and there was a monument just across the road. We walked over and climbed up some steps to the top of a small hill. The marker noted that from this spot David Livingstone had first sighted the Kafue River. The local natives named the spot Munali Hill in honor of Livingstone. Munali means “The Red One.”

Sightseeing completed, we looked for other ways to fill the afternoon. I finished reading the biography of Albert Schweitzer and worked crossword puzzles until the sky began to darken. When the light faded, David, Patson, and I decided to get out of the vehicle and sit on the hillside. We enjoyed long conversations about our families and work at the mission. Patson taught us some Tonga hymns, and the night kept getting darker.

David had bought a newspaper in Lusaka and had read us an article about the night sky. It seems that Mars was going to be more visible this night than it had been in years. We were to look for it on the lower right of the moon. The only catch was that the sighting wouldn’t occur until 10:45. In the meantime there was no moon at all.

A moonless night in Zambia can be described by words like inky, black, and even . . . spooky. We have heard lots of stories about bush animals like lions and leopards. Our rational minds knew that those animals are found only in game parks, but I’ll admit that more than once we jumped up and shone the flashlight into the brush behind us when we heard a noise. We began to scan the road for vehicles coming our way, hoping each time that the lights were those of the big yellow bus coming to get us.

Four hours after we broke down, the bus finally pulled up. Jeremiah, Donald, and Zimba jumped out with the tow bar and (gulp) nothing to use to fasten the tow bar to the vehicles. They’d been searching the stores in Kafue for rope or chain and had no luck. No problem, we say, because we have these great tie-down straps for the Land Rover! The guys set to work fastening the tow bar to the Land Rover, but what’s this? The bus had no towing hitch! There are two yellow buses, you see, and only one has a hitch. I didn’t even want to ask why they chose to bring this one. There was some sort of hook under the bus, so they fastened the tow bar to the hook. This entire process took about an hour, but finally we slowly pulled out and headed up and over Munali Hill.

Donald and Zimba were in the Land Rover. Jeremiah was driving the bus with David, Patson, and I in it. We’d gone less than a mile when Donald started honking the horn. We stopped immediately, and this time there was no shoulder on the road, so were in the roadway. The hook on the bus faced the wrong direction, so the tow bar had already slipped off. The guys got busy trying to work on the situation, and I got busy with the flashlight directing traffic around our vehicles. Let’s just summarize the next hour by saying that I know a lot more about the size of 18-wheeler rigs than I really ever wanted to know. I utilized my favorite coping technique by singing all the verses of “Anywhere with Jesus” a few times.

(Side note to any of my former students who are reading this: I always taught that song to my classes so you would have it in your head when you were out in some dark, scary place and needed to remember some comforting words. It certainly worked for me!)

Once we were moving again, we decided to try a Plan B. We would stop at a village and leave the Land Rover to be picked up in the morning. We stopped at a roadside village. Again the road had no shoulder, so again we were right in the roadway and I was out directing traffic. By this time it was so late at night that there were very few vehicles moving. The dogs in the village announced our arrival, but no one came to greet us. The guys yelled a few times, but decided the villagers were too scared to come out, so we moved on.

Kelly called us at this point and gave us Plan C. John and Shadrach were on their way from Namwianga with a truck. We would find a safe place to leave the Land Rover with Donald in it, and John and Shadrach would come tow it in while the rest of us came on in the bus. By this time the guys had done a good job of getting the tow bar attached to the bus, so on we went. An hour later we limped into Mazabuka and found a deserted filling station. We unhitched the Land Rover and pushed it into a lighted area. Now we had to unload all the groceries from the Land Rover onto the bus. As we were doing this task, we discovered the station wasn’t deserted. It seems there was a night watchman, and he didn’t want us to leave the vehicle there, at least not without some rental fee. Some negotiations ensued, some kwacha went from David’s pocket into the watchman’s pocket, and Donald, Zimba, and the Land Rover stayed while the bus pulled out.

By the way, the moon did eventually come up and we had a spectacular view of Mars.

It was 2:00 a.m. when we arrived back at the mission. Again the groceries were unloaded. We collapsed into bed at 2:30 and slept as only those who have been stranded for hours by the side of a road in rural Zambia can sleep.

John and Shadrach, meanwhile, had taken a fan belt off another Land Rover at the mission before they set out. When they got to Mazabuka, they put that belt on our Land Rover and one of the guys drove the Land Rover home. All of them got in at 6:00 a.m.

The next day David and I marveled at how calmly we had handled the whole situation. Neither one of us had gotten upset or overly worried. We hadn’t snapped at each other or someone else in anger. We decided that this kind of situation is an expected happening when you live where we do and go where we go.

Just another day in Zambia.