Top 10 craziest stories from my mission in Africa

Whenever I tell someone I served a mission in Africa they immediately respond, “I’m sure you have lots of stories.” At the beginning I would think to myself, “no I don’t have a lot of stories, it was pretty chill there in Congo and Cameroon” but later on I reflected on some of the crazy things that I experienced and observed on my mission in Congo/Cameroon. 

1. Gas tank shooting fire and companion getting burned 

The gas tank, spewing out fire

In Congo/Cameroon/Gabon, all of the apartments have gas tanks for the stoves. There are no electric stoves even in the nicest apartments. In Douala, Cameroon, our gas tank was leaking and my companion started trying to fix the gas leakage while the stove was on. I was sitting on the couch in the living room and heard the gas hissing and thought “this isn’t going to be good.” Then I heard a loud boom and felt a blast of warm heat hit me even though I was 40 feet from the kitchen and I heard my companion scream. I ran into the kitchen with a pillow expecting my companion to be covered in flames but luckily only one of his arms had second degree burns. 

We couldn’t turn off the gas tank because a two foot high column of fire was shooting out of it. We yelled at the security guys downstairs and they evacuated the building. Immediately the men in the apartment mobilized to extinguish the fire. First, they poured buckets of water to try to stop it and they flooded our entire apartment in the process and water was flowing down the stairs of the building. Then they got a bunch of their blankets and dunked them in water and threw them on top of the gas tank but the fire still kept shooting out. Finally they filled buckets of sand and smothered the gas tank after 45 minutes of trying. About 30 minutes after the fire was extinguished the fire fighters leisurely pulled up and casually walked up to ask us what was up. That was funny. 

Our apartment was flooded with 1 inch deep water and was covered in soot. Our stove was destroyed. We had to leave that apartment and take my companion to a hospital. We went to one in town and they said there was a two hour line. The district president told us about a special burn hospital so we took him there and we stayed in an apartment nearby for his medical treatment which lasted about two weeks. So for two weeks my companion and I just sat in that apartment and didn’t do any missionary work. 

2. Being stopped by police and brought to police station

We were walking one Monday to go to our cyber cafe when a police officer stopped us and asked us what we were doing here and if we had permission to be here. We told him we had permission to be there and we have never been stopped. It was clear this guy saw us as gullible foreigners he could take advantage of. Another American missionary who was with me said “let’s just give him 20,000 francs” but that was exactly what the police officer was looking for. 

The police officer said he was going to have to take us to the police station for questioning. Luckily, we were able to call the district president who worked nearby and he came to assist us at the police station. We got there and the police station commandant asked us a few questions and then they let us go and we were fine.

3. Sleeping outside the airport on the grass

Us outside the Yaounde Airport

At 3 am

At 6 am

When we received word to evacuate the mission in March 2020 all the missionaries in Congo and Gabon were on planes and out of the country the next day. Us missionaries in Cameroon had it more difficult. The airports and borders were closed by the time the evacuation order came so we were stuck in the country. There were no planes that could come to Cameroon to pick us up. Whenever there was a hint that a plane would come we would wait outside the airport. We did this 3 times. The first two times we left at 10pm and 12am but the third time we stayed outside the airport ALL NIGHT on the grass. We then waited until the plane finally came later that day. Sleeping outside that night probably contributed to me getting malaria.

4. Seeing mob justice in action

Mob justice is the way people deter crime in Congo and Cameroon. If someone is known for being a robber they will be caught and the people will take the law into their own hands and teach the robber a lesson. The first time I saw this I was on a split in another missionary’s area and we were waiting in a courtyard for our investigator to show up. Suddenly a group of people came into the courtyard dragging a young man and threw him on the ground right in front of us. They took off his shirt and each one of them came up and started hitting him and punching him. Then this one woman, who I assumed to be his mom, came out with a giant stick and started beating his back with it until it broke. I thought it was kind of funny but my companion was looking at it all with absolute horror. Then he looked at me and said “that’s our investigator.” I later found out he was a drug addict and was caught stealing from a store and they were beating him to teach him to stop stealing. 

That Sunday I saw him at Church with a bandaid on his head. That was interesting to see. 

The second time I saw mob justice I saw a huge crowd of around 40 people carrying off a guy and who knows what they were going to do with him. 

5. Getting tear gassed

Every Thursday outside of the Congolese capital building the police do riot control exercises with full body armor and tear gas. One day my companion and I were in the bus driving by during one of the exercises and we got a good whiff of tear gas. I didn’t know what it was at the time, my eyes just started watering like when you cut onions and I started rubbing my eyes. Everyone else in the bus was also rubbing their eyes. My companion and I just looked at each other and laughed. 

6. Fighting rats/rats running up and down my bed at night

I have some crazy rat stories. In our Douala apartment, we would see rats on a daily basis. They would poop on the ground, poop on our table, and poop on our food when we would leave it out. It was terrible. There was a rat that lived in our bedroom and he would literally run across my bed as I slept. When we would close the door, the rat would start gnawing on the door to get out. I threw my sandal at it to stop. We finally killed that rat and we stopped seeing any. 

In Brazzaville, my companion saw a rat under the stove and got a broom to flush it out. The rat ran into the living room and crawled up the curtains. My companion whacked the curtain and it came crashing down. Then the rat started running in circles and my companion was maniacally hitting the ground with the broom until it bent and he smashed a bucket next to him filled with dirty water. Finally he hit the rat and I picked it up and threw it in the trash. 

In one apartment in Douala there were eight missionaries staying overnight for transfers to Yaounde and we found a rat running into one of the rooms. All eight of us ran into the small room and closed the door, sealing the rat with us. We started to attack it with brooms, fufu sticks, and whatever else we could find. The rat was jumping all over the place, climbing up the bunk bed, jumping off near our heads, running over our feet and we finally killed it.

7. Sleeping in unbearable heat

This is an experience every missionary in Congo/Cameroon will have to go through. We were in an apartment in Douala, Cameroon where the power would shut off EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. Douala was going through a rough time  with power back then and the power would turn off in the entire city. At night the entire city would go dark and our building had a backup generator and all the other apartments in the building would get power but it wouldn’t work for us. Our room would get so hot it literally felt like my insides were getting cooked. I had slept in Congo without power but Douala is way hotter. We then slept on the ground in the living room and we were getting eaten alive by mosquitos. 

When the power would turn on around 7am we would sleep for an hour or two and then start the day. 

8. Walking in flooded streets

Everyone knows in Africa when it rains it rains hard. Me and my companion were teaching a lesson when a rainstorm came in and it was raining so hard we couldn’t hear each other so we just waited in silence for an hour. We left the lesson after the worst had passed and the  street had 4-5 inches of water just flowing down. We had to walk through it for 20 minutes to get to our bus stop. 

9. The rainstorms

There are some crazy rainstorms in Congo and Cameroon, especially in Congo. The thunder is so strong that at night it rattles the apartment and the flashing of lightning keeps you awake. The morning after a rainstorm it looks like a hurricane hit land with broken trees everywhere and debris on the streets. The amount of water that flows literally changes how our teaching areas look because of erosion and some peoples houses are flooded with sand. 

Honorable mentions: the buses, the markets, the cockroaches, the crazy evangelical churches. Whole volumes could be written just on these four subjects