Bus People

I got on the bus and a whole new sea of strange faces met me. Not that there was anything bad or scary about the faces, I just didn’t know the people the faces belonged to. Laurel and I found our seats and I tried to remember why we had chosen to take the bus to and from South Africa instead of flying. Flying would have been a whole lot easier, and nicer. But, the bank account said no, and here we were on the bus. And this bus was completely full. There was no option of having two seats to myself for the overnight ride. Now, this wasn’t a problem, really, I just was not excited. And, to make matters more interesting, OF COURSE Laurel and I were the only two foreigners (white people) on the bus. We stuck out like sore thumbs, not that this is a new concept to us.

We stopped at a gas station, and I got out to get some fresh air. As I was getting out, I saw a white South African who had just arrived to check out the bus. He saw me and immediately made sure that I was okay and that everything was going fine. That was nice.

But everybody on the bus were still strangers to me. I didn’t know them, and being the shy introvert that I am, I did not readily initiate conversations with everybody or anybody around me. I simply sat in my seat, listening to my music and ignoring everybody else on the bus. After almost one hundred hours spent on buses on this vacation alone, not to mention the way-too-many hours spent on buses when we traveled at Christmastime, I was definitely used to my fair share of being surrounded by strangers in confined spaces, but I still didn’t appreciate it.

Though, as time passed, I began to feel a whole lot differently about these strangers. They began to feel like friends. If I didn’t know where to go at border crossings, I would look for these strangers to see what I was supposed to do and where I was supposed to go. As we walked through no-man’s land at one border crossing, the lady next to me started talking with me. And, as the hours passed, more and more of the Malawians on the bus started asking us questions. Why were we, two white girls, going to Malawi? What had we been doing in South Africa? How long had we been in Africa? Did we like Malawi? When we finally did arrive in Blantyre and got off the bus, one fellow traveller even welcomed us home.

A lot of the bus rides that we took ended this way. It felt like we were all friends. These people were no longer strangers, though their names were still a mystery to me. I don’t know what they do, what they like, or anything about them, and I hardly talked to them. Yet, at the end of the thirty hour bus ride, my initial sentiments as I boarded the bus in Johannesburg were gone. The shared experience of the bus ride and border crossings seemed to break down unknown barriers, and suddenly we were all the same. We were all residents of Malawi, traveling back home.