A Long Way Home!

A trip I will never forget!

By the time you are finished reading this post, you probably are going to have noticed an absence of the beautiful writing style and story telling abilities that you are used to from Kate. If you make that observation, you will be correct. These are the first three sentences I (Jordan) have ever written on this blog. Writing is near the top of the list when it comes to things I dislike. Almost equal to poison ivy or smashing my thumb in the door! Why am I writing then? Mainly to satisfy all the people who say I must finally write a post. Secondly, I guess I would like to share the story of a trip I was honored to be a part of. My goal through this post is to tell a story that has a thread of God’s undeniable goodness to his children woven through it. For those of you like me, who prefer to read a story through pictures, you can read it that way. For those of you who are truly curious and have nothing better to do, I hope you enjoy reading the narrative. I do apologize for the length, but I just didn’t know what to leave out.

Most of you I’m sure have read the story of, or at least heard of a man named Sambany. If you don’t know about him, you can read the beginning of his story with Mercy Ships here.

In short, Sambany came to the ship with a 16.45 lb tumor clinging to the left side of his face. While on the ship, he found healing in the form of surgery and lots of love from so many people who cared for him and prayed for him. He spent nearly five months with us until he was fully healed and ready to return to his home in his village. With his permission, Mercy Ships used his story quite a bit to help spread the word about what we do. Because of this, they wanted to honor him by helping him return to his village.

This is Sambany and his grandson Flavy on their first day on the Africa Mercy.

This is Sambany on the morning we picked him up. Happy and ready to roll!!

I was asked to be a part of the team commissioned with the task of bringing Sambany home. My primary job in carpentry doesn’t afford me much opportunity to work closely with the patients in the hospital so when I was asked to go along I was incredibly excited!!

The team consisted of Me, Josh Callow, Eunice Hiew, Laurin Avara, Scott Reed and our translator Tsoa. This is the team that I spent 5 days with, hiked 33 miles and gained 2500 of                                 elevation with and loved every minute of it.

Starting from the left Laurin Avara, Sambany, Scott Reed, Josh Callow,
Eunice Hiew, Tsoa, Flavy, and Myself.

I was informed of this trip on a Tuesday afternoon. Having an idea of what we might be getting in to, I started to pray and prepare. We left the ship on Thursday at 6:30 am. Our first stop was at the Hope Center where Sambany and his nephew Flavy had been staying for the last few months while Sambany healed. After picking them up we pointed our two Toyota Landcruisers straight South for about six and a half hours. Just shy of the town of Mahanoro is where we were supposed to turn straight west and hopefully drive as close as we could to his village. We had been told by locals that as soon as we turned off of the pavement, there would be a bridge to cross. We were also told that the bridge was in good shape and that we shouldn’t have any trouble crossing. We spent about two hours trying several different cow paths to find the bridge. Each time we would ask a local which was the right path, we would get a different answer. Now we know that each person we asked knew the bridge was completely washed away and has been for a long time but culturally they have a hard time telling you something that you don’t want to hear. 

This is the birdge we were supposed to cross.

Instead they happily point you in a direction with a smile and a wave. That's not real helpful when you have somewhere you're trying to go. When we finally found the completely washed out bridge, we went on into the town of Mahanoro and spent the night. The next morning, we set out at 5:30 and drove to a village a little north of the bridge where we thought we would start walking. Someone told us that we could keep driving for another 3 miles on that trail and park at a school. Once parked, we started hiking. Earlier we had bought 110 lbs of rice as a gift for Sambany's village. I was not real keen on adding it to the 35 lbs I was already carrying and nobody else in the team was either so we paid three local musclemen in the first village we came across to carry it for us. Also as we were walking out of that village, we noticed Sambany talking to a woman who seemed elated to see him. Tsoa told us it was Sambany’s wife. Her name is Barazophy and she was beside herself with excitement! We later learned that she and her village had been told that Sambany and Flavy were dead. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that someone who knew the truth passed through her village and corrected that myth. Still the reunion between the two was very heartwarming. Her excitement over Sambany's presence and new face was apparent. We still don’t know what she was doing in that village but she abandoned whatever her purpose was and walked with us.

Sambany and his wife Barazophy happy to be together again!

About seven and a half hours of walking later, we all agreed that our legs were gonna come unhooked and fall off if we didn’t stop. We spent the night in a village where our team of six shared a one room house with Sambany, his wife, his nephew and our three rice carrier buddies. The house was completely void of any accommodations except a floor and a whole host of Lord of the Rings sized spiders in the ceiling. To our weary bodies though it was a five star resort. After a huge bowl of plain rice with a few noodles on top was safely in our bellies we snuggled down on the wood floor and slept. Our sleep was far from deep though as Sambany in his excitement to get home did not stop talking the entire night!! He had also purchased two radios while here in Tamatave. Somewhere he had gotten his hands on an SD card with about 15 songs on it. This he played on his radio THE ENTIRE WAY to his village at full volume. He also played it all night long. It exercised every single ounce of tolerance our team possessed as we all reviewed in our minds the different ways there would be to silence a radio. Morning came though and we strapped on our packs, shook the fuzzies out of our eyes and headed out.

Barazophy with her radio.

As you can see, the trail was beautiful! It was pretty well solid mud the entire way and very narrow. It took us through rice fields, villages, across streams, one river that we had to wade across and up what felt like about ten Mount Everests. One of the things I meditated on much of the way was the diversity and individuality of our God. No matter where you are in the world, all the diverse beauty that we see around us points us to one place. GOD the creator! Madagascar is no exception! We stood on mountain top after mountain top with breathtaking panoramas. 

I found a buddy!

As we neared the end of the day, it became clear that we were running out of water. There was no place to buy water out as far as we were and there wouldn’t be until we got almost back to our cars. We passed through a village that had a few coconut palms so we bought 24 of them and came away with 5 liters of coconut milk. The milk didn’t spend much time in the bottle though as we were all pretty thirsty. Finally after about eight hours of walking, Sambany said we would be to his village very soon. This put a little extra wind in our sails and we got to his village at about 4 pm. He was like a little kid on the last day of school! He couldn’t wait to be home! He stopped and put on a long white shirt type thing and we crossed one last stream and entered his village. He went straight to the center of town where they have a flag pole with no flag on it and he stood there and prayed. 

Sambany gives all the credit and glory to God for his healing! I don’t know what his knowledge or belief in God was like when he came to the ship, but through his time on the ship he met God in a real and personal way! As he then proceeded to his house, the village people began to come out of the woodwork and gather around. To them Sambany’s whole identity no doubt had been the huge tumor that he had carried around. Now it was gone and their reactions were very moving. Even though I understand surgery and the healing process to a degree, even I still stared at his face in wonder at the fact that something like that can be removed and healed. So it’s no wonder that these village people who have no idea what surgery on a ship is, stared at him in wonder. One of my favorite parts of the Bible is when Jesus combines physical healing with spiritual and emotional healing. Sambany is proof that Jesus is STILL healing through the hands of Doctors and Nurses and people like you who pray. Now for as long as Sambany lives, he will serve as a testimony in his region to the love of God. Our prayer is that he will be able to communicate that to his village in the days and years to come. One truth that sank a little bit deeper into my heart on this trip was how God loves us all equally! As we got to know Sambany and his wife a little, we learned to love them and enjoy their company. A few times I met someone along the way whose personality would remind me of someone back home. As I watched Sambany and found myself in a place completely different than the world that I live in, I was forced to look into how God transcends all the differences and loves us not for what we have or who we think we are but because of the way HE see us. He made us with such individuality and He knows that thing which makes each of us unique from each other. He loves us equally and deeply. Therefore he sees me and Sambany the SAME. If he didn’t prevent that tumor in Sambany, He wouldn’t necessarily prevent it in me either. That realization of truth for me brings a whole new level of compassion and urgency to the hurting people of this world. God loves every single one and nobody in 2015 should be living with 16lb tumors on their face.

This is outside Sambany's house. Some of the people you see here are checking out Sambany and some of them are checking out the weird white people.

Inside his house, he told his story to the village elders.

While Josh and Eunice started interviewing people and capturing the whole reunion on camera, Scott watched all of our bags. Laurin and I set about to solving our water shortage issue. We were completely out and all of us were dealing with early symptoms of dehydration. As some of you reading this know me well, you know that I’m a recovering germaphobe. Acting out of that paradigm, I set myself to make sure the water we were to acquire would be as free of little bugs as possible. We got water from the nearby river and put in on a fire to boil. Four hours later, we had boiled, cooled and UV penned 25 liters of river water. Once we got past the smoky earthy taste and the cloudy, floaty filled texture, it tasted great! The important thing was that it rehydrated us.

We spent the night in Sambany’s village once again on the floor of a house. We dined on the rice we had brought with us and again some noodles on the top. They also brought us some bananas and a little later on, some chicken which we ate for breakfast the next morning along with some cold rice.

After saying our goodbyes and receiving a gift from the village of three live chickens and some rice, we took the same trail we had brought and set out for our cars.

Before we left the whole village got together for a photo.

The way back had a lot more downhill in it which helped us make better time. Ten hours of grueling hiking later, we were within about four miles of our cars. We decided to stop for the night as it was getting dark and this was the first village we could actually buy water at again. After we ate one of our chickens with some rice, we sat around waiting to collapse on the wood floor. At this point God did something really cool. Eunice wanted to sing a song so we did. This led to about an hours worth of song. We were tired, we stank really bad, we each had sores and blisters but our hearts were bursting with the joy of the Lord!! Any song we could think of, we belted out. When we were pretty sure our cobbled together melodies had driven out all the spiders in the ceiling, we finished with a time of prayer thanking God for taking care of us to that point and trusting Him for the rest of the way. One of things that had me nervous was how remote we were. If someone would have got sick or injured, it would have changed our trip greatly. In the end, no one got sick or injured at all. THANK YOU all for your prayers!

Dinner of chicken and rice.

Our singing could be heard through the whole village!

 The next morning, we all put on our wet muddy clothes for the last time and headed to the river where we were delighted to learn that we could take dugout canoes all the way to the cars! All of our blisters joined together in a chorus of thanksgiving that we were DONE hiking! We piled in two canoes and enjoyed the river as yet another part of God’s creation. The canoes had zero stability and we all held our breaths and barely blinked for fear of tipping. Somehow neither canoe tipped and at last the cars came into sight.

The Toyota symbol has never looked prettier! After changing into clean clothes, we pointed our cars back North, and arrived back to the ship just in time for dinner.

Toyota Landcruisers have never looked so good!