Survey Trip: Week Two

Saturday, June 7th – We met with the Chipenda's again, this time at their home. They recommended a good beach near their house, so we went there for lunch and played in the waves for awhile. That evening, we met with a Brazilian eye doctor and his family at their home. They fed us dinner and proved to be a wealth of information on life in Benguela.

Sunday, June 8th – We worshiped with an ICA church in Benguela and enjoyed our time with them. Alex nearly got clipped by a motorcycle after the service while he was playing outside – very scary moment. In the afternoon, we wanted to visit a local beach called Baia Farta (and, yes, I believe we cracked about every joke in the book and then some about the name). Baia Farta definitely lived up its name!  It was about the nastiest beach I have ever been on – piles of burning garbage, piles of drying fish, and of course, flies everywhere. We quickly decided to try another beach called Baia Azul, and this one proved much more pleasant. Getting home that night was quite the adventure. Our driver basically ditched us, and we could never find a taxi because we were pretty far out of town, so Rusty eventually flagged a passing car. The driver turned out to be a friendly Portuguese man who, along with his brother, managed to get us all back to the YWAM compound safely.

Monday, June 9th – We took a bus from Benguela to Lubango. For an entertaining account of our day (and a lesson on why NOT to rely on public transportation in Africa), please visit Teague's blog. We arrived in Lubango safely after an extremely long day, and were very glad to be warmly welcomed by the missionary community there.

Tuesday, June 10th – Teague and Jordan spent the day at the mission hospital. The rest of us did laundry, visited with the missionaries on the compound where we were staying, and spent some time in downtown Lubango. We had yummy hamburgers for lunch at a hole-in-the-wall (literally) restaurant, very popular among the expat community.

Wednesday, June 11th – Team prayer-time in the morning, followed by our first moto-taxi (motorcycle taxi) rides! It was pretty fun (Alex stayed home with Robert and Teague)! We spent more time in downtown Lubango, then had lunch with the Holden's, long-time missionaries to Angola, out at their house, which is still under construction. Later that afternoon, Rusty and Danny went to the mission hospital while the rest of us headed up to the Cristo Rei statue that overlooks Lubango.

Thursday, June 12th – We enjoyed a day just to relax at home before beginning the next part of our journey. We did laundry, emailed, and blogged, and Alex got a good nap in. We had dinner with one of the professors at ISTEL (the interdenominational seminary) and his family.

Friday, June 13th – We flew from Lubango to Huambo on a small 10-seater plane that the team chartered with MAF (Missions Aviation Fellowship). We arrived in time for lunch at a local restaurant, where we met Justin Pearce, an English journalist who now lives in Huambo. We found a guest house with enough beds for all of us for the night. Rusty, Alex, and I stayed back for the afternoon to rest while the rest of the team went out to explore the town.