With Air Zimbabwe on 17th July I flew into Victoria Falls, jumped a shuttle bus to the border, taxied into Zambia, to Overland Missions Base on the Zambezi River gorge edge overlooking the boiling waters of Rapid 14.
Settled into my tent, I joined my dear friends Dr Frank Hubbell and Pastor Paul Richardson of SOLO – freshly flown from USA, to joyously catch up on the past few months since I left them in Conway, New Hampshire. We had descended on Rapid 14 to teach a SOLO Missionary Wilderness First Responder course to 16 students of Overland Missions’ second Advanced Missionary Training program. Advanced First Aid is one among many essential skills the AMT student will graduate with following three months of intense experiential training.
Over the next ten days I was blessed to work with Frank and Paul teaching practical emergency medicine and creating Trauma Mayhem for our students to solve as they reinforced the lessons. The course went very well and the students did great. Running this course in the wilds of rural Zambia, the scenery, the ruggedness, mountain bikes and construction sites for realistic props – all added to the uniqueness of this joint program between Mandate 3 (Solo’s faith based non-profit for humanitarian ventures) and Overland Missions. For me, teaching with such great instructors and godly men as Frank and Paul was a rich blessing, as the misty vision we had spoken about a year earlier – me training to teach for Solo in Africa – became a reality.
The course ending, I bussed up to Lusaka where I successfully obtained a 12 month visa for the USA stamped into my Zimbabwe passport, so I am able to return to the States any time within the next year. God is good!
