Load 'em up! Sights from the Road.

It's always interesting driving around the city and across the country. People here are very talented at maximizing the capacity of vehicles. Here are some common everyday sights we see as we drive around. In the above picture, you can't see the vehicle... just a bunch of men on it. There's a pick up truck underneath them somewhere.


These vans are used as bush taxis. They are notoriously loaded on the inside and outside. Anything you can think of can go on or in them. Furniture...

Supplies... motorcycles...


chickens...


sheep...


Sacks of food...


Any more space? Maybe one more sack.

Another common sight is piles of wood bundles along the side of the road. Most people cook their food outside over a fire, so wood is sold everywhere.


Trucks come by the wood depots, load up with the wood, and take it to the towns/cities to be sold.


Each larger village/town will have a market day each week. On the market day, these shelters in the picture above will be filled with people, animals, and stuff to be sold. People will walk from miles around to go to the market day.


The activity of the market day in this town is overflowing into the main road that goes across the country.
People and trucks everywhere.


Need some meat? Get it while it's fresh.

Galmi is famous across the country and even some surrounding countries for its onions. These are huge burlap sacks full of onions. Each sack weighs about 300 lbs. Every year, we buy 2-3 of these sacks of onions. We fly them in to the city when we have room on the plane and distribute them amongst the police at the airport, traffic controllers, workers at the Department of Civil Aviation, etc... If we haven't brought them onions for a while, everyone starts asking us when we're bringing onions again.


This truck is loaded with sacks of Galmi onions.

Another common sight is broken down trucks... sometimes overturned trucks. Amazingly, they somehow manage to get the trucks righted again. We recently flew four people in to the city because a truck like this one had overturned and completely blocked the main road across the country. There was no way around it for hours, so we got called to fly out and pick up some folks trying to make it in to the city.