The kitchen counter adventure

 A few weeks ago I finally was able to pick up my next piece of furniture from my carpenter: my kitchen counter. It's absolutely perfect and I love it! It's about six feet long and about a foot and a half wide. It's great because I had him build an extra counter/shelf underneath the top and the floor. Extra storage, always thinkin bout that! So, getting the counter to my house, or getting any furniture from my carpenter's house to my house, is always interesting, I've noticed. Since there's no home delivery, the thing to do to get the furniture to my house is to find someone outside of Limpopo market in Xai Xai and pay them 200 MTS to transport it for me. BUT, this time one of my friends who has a truck helped me out for free.

  Roads. It's all sand and hills. Sandy hills. It can  be difficult to drive in if the sand is loose and not packed- if you're not careful you could lose control...kind of like hydroplaning..but that's for water, is there a word for that for sand? Anyway, most of the roads have packed sand. So we finally get to the carpenter's house, get the counter loaded up and unfortunately my friend didn't have extra rope to fasten the counter to the bed of the truck. No worries, my friend had picked up two of his friends and so they and the carpenter hop into the bed of the truck and were holding onto the counter with their hands and sitting on the side of the bed. The site of this definitely made me worry- either them or the counter is surely going to fly off. But my friend was driving slow, taking it easy. We were just cruuuuising along until we come across the final road that connects his neighborhood to mine. We get to the entrance of this road to find a car ahead that is stuck in sand. There was about a ten foot pool of loose sand about two feet deep. Kids and men were trying to dig the car out. I thought well, surely we're going to go back and find another way because we're going to get stuck too and then we'll be here for hours.

 We didn't go back and find another way. We tried to go around the car into the grass but saw that the left side of the truck was in the sand and was getting stuck. So we backed up. Tried again. Failed. My friend and the other guys hop out of our truck and start trying to get the other car out of the sand. They finally dug it out and pushed it back. We attempted again but this time my friend decided to try to go through the sand where the other car had attempted. Of course that didn't work and we got stuck, too. I was just chillin' in the front as about twenty children and six grown men were trying to push the truck out. My counter was still in the back, not strapped down. Everyone finally pushed the truck out of the sand to the beginning of the road where we started. Then the guys start talking in the local language and next thing I know the carpenter gets in the driver's seat next to me and doesn't say anything. The other guys don't get in the bed of the truck and don't remove my counter from it either. Then he reversed the truck a little bit then starts revving the engine. Then he just looks at me, hails Mary, and floors it. I look back and my counter is wobbling, surely going to fall, I thought. I wasn't really sure what exactly his plan was. I didn't think he was going to go full speed into the pool of sand. Ohhh but he was. As we were speeding up there were some kids in the road, looking shocked and amazed and curious as to what he was going to do. Oh God, I thought, move!! They all did.

 As soon as we got to the loose sand we started to fish tail and lose some control but that didn't stop him. He was quick to turn the wheel the right way to avoid spinning. Next thing I know we kind of just glided over the top of the sand to the end of it. I looked back and my kitchen counter stayed not only in the bed of the truck, but upright!

 When we got back on normal ground we stopped and he has this huge smile on his face and says to me, "You didn't know I could drive, did you?"