Day 43: Locomotion

I woke up at 3:30 AM when our train finally started moving. We had been delayed about 8 hours, but at least we were finally heading to Mombasa. I promptly fell right back to sleep and woke up in the morning to the sound of a bell signalling breakfast.

I was one week from being home in the United States. I had already been in Kenya for 6 weeks. There wasn't even more "official" ministry for our team to do; we were going to debrief, meaning we would be preparing for reentry into the U.S. and getting ready to integrate the transformation we had experienced with our normal lives.

So I being the introvert I am, I found an empty compartment in the train and spent time just looking out at the landscape rushing by and reflecting on the trip. It was really hot on the train and so I definitely found myself either feeling really tired or just sitting there thinking. I also spent a good amount of time just talking to Mike Misson, whom I had recently gotten to know pretty well.

We finally arrived in Mombasa around 6-6:30 that day. We were all tired from being confined inside a hot, stuffy train for so many hours. Imagine our joy at seeing an air-conditioned charter bus as our mode of transportation to the place we would be staying at. It turns out the place we were going to stay at was just a few hundred feet from the Indian Ocean. We couldn't really see the ocean that night, but we definitely could feel the sense of wonder just being right next to the Indian Ocean. There's actually a bunch of crazy things that happened this night, but the stories are too long and/or not exactly fit for this blog, so ask me about them if you remember.

Here began the beginning of the end of the GP. We were officially in the debriefing phase of our missions trip. It was time to get ready to go home.

My small group leader, Ryan Davenport, and I looking through our debriefing papers on the train. It was freaking hot on that thing.