Mercy Triumphs by Jana Kelley

Author:Jana Kelley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Hope Publishers
Published: 2017-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

Nubian Desert, Sudan

As the car left the city of Khartoum and the square buildings disappeared from the shoulders of the road, Mia’s body began to relax. The sand began to claim the shoulders and parts of the edges of the tarmac and the square mud-brick houses moved farther away from the road, collecting into little villages dotting the desert on either side. The farther from town the Weston family traveled, the less frequent the villages appeared.

Mia couldn’t fully relax yet, however. They still had to pass one or two police checkpoints to get to their destination. They were prepared with copies of each passport and a letter of permission to travel that they had obtained from the Khartoum police office.

Police checkpoints were identified by an object blocking the road. It could be a wooden box or a metal gate of some sort. In this case it was a broken plastic chair. A shipping container on the side of the road, converted into a makeshift police station, confirmed this spot was the checkpoint. Men in military uniform saw the vehicle approaching and stepped toward the blockade, guns slung over their shoulders.

Unable to tame their curiosity at a car full of foreigners so far outside of town, several men gathered around the driver’s window. Michael handed them the paperwork. They thumbed through the papers, as if trying to find something wrong with them—something to enable them to keep the car from passing through. Mia held her breath. They had never actually been turned away, though others had. Mia hoped it wouldn’t be them this time.

Mia whispered a prayer and immediately wondered if it was OK to ask God for help on something like a police checkpoint. She wondered if God would listen to her plea for help. She hadn’t exactly been spending time in prayer or reading her Bible the past few days. She silently promised God she would spend some time with Him out in the desert if He would just get them through the checkpoint.

The guard in charge nodded his head and pulled the plastic chair out from the middle of the road, waving the car through. Mia breathed a sigh of relief.

As Mia’s shoulders relaxed, she peered out the window. Nothing between them and the pyramids except desert. As far as her eyes could see there was brown sand. Short acacia trees dotted the landscape, along with herds of goats nibbling on the tiny leaves from the barbed branches. Then the ground became a giant field of desert melons: baseball-sized gourds scattered about the sand, almost indistinguishable from the sand around them.

Villages appeared like mirages. The square dwellings were camouflaged against the vast sandy surroundings. The only reason a passerby would even notice the cloisters of houses was because in each village there was one brightly colored building, the only one with real paint on it. If one were to drive by at nighttime, which was not advisable in the desert, the village mosque would be the only one using electric light.

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