We arrived yesterday at the Lilongwe airport, where three of our colleagues helped us get safely back to our home on the farm. Our luggage also made it, after a bit of a misadventure. I must say that the story of our luggage is a bit embarrassing, but it should probably be told:

Six hours before our flight out of St Louis, we dropped off our long-term rental minivan, piled ourselves and all of our luggage into a short-term rental minivan, and headed down the highway to the airport. After a few miles, my obsessiveness started to kick in: We hadn’t counted the bags when we made the switch. I always count the bags. Before loading, after loading, every time we move, and every few minutes if we’re sitting around not moving in a public place. I counted the bags as they came OUT of the other van, but didn’t count them as they went INTO this one. Penny humored me, and we pulled off into a church parking lot where I counted the bags. All there.

Penny hit the button to close the tailgate, we hopped in, and we drove off. (You already know what’s going to happen next, don’t you?)

A mile down the highway, another vehicle zooms up beside us blowing their horn and making lots of hand gestures, notifying us that our tailgate was open! Penny pulled over and I hopped out to assess the situation: Two bags missing! I closed the tailgate, MANUALLY this time, and started running back while Penny drove up to the next exit so she could drive around to our starting point. There was nothing in the road. No bags, no bits of stuff, nothing at all. Two bags full of carefully acquired, packed, weighed, repacked, and reweighed valuables, completely gone.

After going back to the church hoping the bags would be in the parking lot, we asked the church staff if somebody had found bags and brought them in. Sorry, no. So all four of us started scouring the road, looking in the median, in the tall grass, in the drainage ditches. Taz found a snake and we all found various bits of trash, but after over an hour we still hadn’t turned up even a scrap of our luggage.

Then a guy named Mike drove up beeping the horn as Penny was scouring the median. He said he found our bags!

It turns out the bags fell off in the road at the point where we turned onto the highway. One had popped open, but he gathered everything together, packed it into his truck, and drove to his house to try to figure out what to do with it. There were a couple of backpacks, so first he was thinking that they might belong to people at a nearby campground, but when he found a stack of Kindle Orphan Outreach brochures, he decided that it must belong to church people. So he drove to the church where we had parked the van and found our kids, who directed him to Penny.

We went with Mike to his house, tossed everything back into the suitcases, and headed for the airport, still with more than enough time to catch our first flight. At this point it appears that we lost an electric multimeter and a paperback book, but they could just be tucked inside something that we haven’t opened yet. How do we know that nothing else was missing? We have lists of exactly what was in each bag–obsessiveness does have its advantages.