Blessings from God

So I know in my last posting I said I would write more about what I had been doing to catch you all up, sorry that has not happend. However I did live through a rather terrifying experience and since i do hate to keep things to myself I thought I would share it with the loyal few who have kept reading this.

Tuesday afternoon, myself and two of my volunteer friends decided to leave Cotonou and head back up to Parakou to get an early start there before all the other volunteers show up. The 2:30 bus left at 3ish like always and we were on our way. It started out as an uneventful trip. Wonderfully the airconditioning was working and the horrible music video that they play on the tv screens was turned down low instead of at its normal ear splitting level.

It was probably around 8 or so, several hours into our journey with perhaps 2-3 still to go that I first noticed a burning smell. No one seemed to pay much attention to this so neither did I. I involved myself in a book I had brought along, reading by the flashlight at the end of myself phone, when a family of 3 rushed forward yelling to the driver to pull over the bus is on fire. I did not believe them at first because even though there was smoke and obviously a problem there probably was not a fire. So I did not panic. However they kept yelling for the driver to pull over and finally he did and this time when I looked back I did infact see flames. Oh Shit! The Beninise are not known for doing things in an quick and/or orderly fashion but thankfully the buss was only half full so though some pushing and shoving we were all able to get off. At one point we were contemplating going out the window when the driver was not opening the door fast enough but again thankfully that ended up not being necessary.

I would say within 2-3 minutes of all of us getting off the bus the entire thing went up in flames. It looked like something out of an action movie, thank god though the explosion part was missing, even though that is what the three of us kept thinking would happen. At this point we were still several hours from our destination and in the middle of nowhere. A bus heading up to Niamey stopped to check out what was going on, at this point they could see the fire but the fact that it was a bus was unrecognizable. The ppl on the bus were nice enough to make room for us on their bus and take us to where we were going. It seems just when you are ready to call it quits God gives us just what we need.

And so that is my adventure. It is a blessing from God that my friend and I as well as everyone on the bus made it through this ordeal. Had it been a full bus, I feel that this story would have been very different with a very different ending.