We woke up at 6:30am Friday morning with a small packed bag and a loaf of banana bread I made the night before so we could have breakfast on the road. We picked up our friend and translator and drove the long, windy road to the capital city of Bujumbura. After the 2 hour drive I was feeling a little queasy, but we had to keep going! We picked up a friend we recently met from the States who was in Burundi visiting his mom, his name is Tewen. We continued to drive another hour, but this drive might have been even worse. The “road” looked something like this…

Our goal is to visit widows that do not get visited when teams come, because they live so far away. It is hot, it is painfully bumpy and it is extremely tiring. We find also that on these visits something interesting always happens. Something to deter or disrupt our plans. We need your prayers over these visit days.

This time a school let out right next to where we were meeting the widows. It’s hard to comprehend unless you have experienced it, but when the white people are around we are the main attraction. It was so difficult to meet with the widows when we were surrounded and sometimes pushed because the crowd was so big surrounding us. To most you’re just interesting with your American clothes, white skin and different hair. But to some you’re just a giant dollar sign and all you hear is “givve me.” It’s exhausting.

Sadly, these kids weren’t all nice and some tried to get in the bag I had with gifts for the widows. They were not listening to the adults around either and they would push and talk loudly so it made it hard to hear the widows sometimes. When we were leaving they literally were hanging on our vehicle. We learned a lot through it, a lot of what to do next time and what to never do again, like never meet in the open and never meet by a school.

When we said our goodbyes to the widows and to the complete chaos of kids we began our hour drive back to the city on the bumpy roads. Suddenly, Josh pulled off the road and stopped. He said, “our brakes aren’t working well.” He continued to test them off to the side of the road and we decided to drive to a mechanic in town still about 30 minutes away, but we had to try. We kept driving a few minutes but the brakes were getting worse and worse. I could tell Josh was tense on the inside, but keeping calm on the outside. I knew the brakes were all but shot at that point.

There we were driving with motorcycles, bikes, cars and people walking all around us and at any minute we knew we could hit one of them because we couldn’t come to a complete stop. I was praying as we all sat there trying to decide…do we pull off on the side of the road, not knowing what is wrong or if a mechanic is anywhere in sight and not knowing the area or who would come up to us or do we keep driving and risk a crash, maybe it wouldn’t be too bad because we are going slow? Literally at that moment I saw a sign “mecanique et lave auto” and I said, “doesn’t that mean mechanic?!” We slowly pulled in and Josh put the vehicle in park safely.

It took 2 1/2 hours because the mechanic had to take a taxi to the other mechanic shop-the one we were trying to drive to which is the area of the city with all the car parts. I thought that was just fine, he could drive in the taxi that had brakes to get the part and bring it back instead of us driving with no brakes. Something had hit our brake line and broke it. When I say these roads are rough, I’m not kidding.

We were all thankful to get back safely and the boys did an incredible job. What a long, long day but we were able to see the hand of God so clearly too. Don’t ever underestimate what your prayers are doing for us. God is working, He has a plan, He will provide. I know some think we’re crazy, why would you take your boys to Africa and have them living in such danger. I’ve had people ask me if I really think it’s worth it. I prefer to think of it as us together as a family getting to see the hand of God in ways we usually don’t in the U.S. It’s not easy, there’s not much in Burundian life that is easy in fact, but it’s good and it’s good for all of us to see God always provides.