Following graduate school, I served as a Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) volunteer in Congo (then called Zaire) and had just attended a meeting in another province where we had been discussing rural development issues. I was booked to fly home on the national airline from the regional airport in that province but the return flight was cancelled while I was traveling. There were no other flights available for a couple of weeks. A missionary pilot stationed nearby told me that while he would like to fly me back to the small city where I lived, he couldn’t because the plane’s engine was scheduled for maintenance. Heavy rains had washed away a bridge in the direction that I needed to go