I almost died today!

A morning when brakes failed, fate trembled, and a ditch became our lifeline.

Wednesday, February 18th – 6:38 a.m.

Written by Joni Roberts

Traveler, storyteller, and public health advocate

And I’m sitting on the side of the road because our Land Cruiser has no brakes.

This is not how I imagined starting the day.

We’re headed to clinic—down to the southernmost part of the country in Mulanje, near the Mozambique border. It’s a two-hour journey on a good day. When we run large clinics with the full team, we send two vehicles. That means we start picking people up between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m., weaving through neighborhoods in the early morning dark.

This morning, it was just the driver, one colleague we had already picked up, and me. We were on our way to collect the rest of the team when the driver realized something was wrong.

The brakes weren’t working.

What makes this harder to process is that the driver stayed late last night—until 8 or 9 p.m.—waiting for a mechanic to “fix” those very brakes. I don’t know what was repaired or what was claimed to be repaired. In places like this, haphazard work is common. Sometimes it feels like things are patched just enough to fail again so you have to come back.

As we were driving down an incline in a residential area, the driver pressed the brake—and nothing happened.

Thank God we were in a manual vehicle.

He downshifted quickly to regain some control, using the engine to slow us down. Then he steered the Land Cruiser off the road, dodging light poles and homes, guiding us deliberately into a ditch. We finally came to a stop in a cluster of bushes and shrubs.

We are safe.

But we are sitting in a ditch at 6:38 in the morning.

We’ve called the other driver to bring the second vehicle and pick us up so we can still make it to clinic. The mechanic is apparently on the way—but at this point, we need a new mechanic. This could have ended very differently.

We could have been in the hospital today.

There weren’t many cars on the road, thankfully. We didn’t have to swerve around traffic. But when you think about it—the number of ways this could have gone wrong is overwhelming. Brake failure isn’t one of those everyday fears that sits at the top of your mind. Yet in a split second, it becomes very real.

And still—we have clinic.

It’s a large one. We can’t manage with just one vehicle and half the team. We still need to pick everyone up. We still need to drive two hours south toward Mozambique. The work doesn’t pause just because the road reminds you how fragile you are.

This week has already been unpredictable.

On Monday, I didn’t go to clinic because I was in the capital. But the team couldn’t reach the clinic site anyway. It’s rainy season. It rains every day. The roads are slick and muddy, traction unreliable. The rivers near the villages were too high to cross, and there’s no bridge. The vehicle couldn’t pass.

So Monday’s clinic was canceled.

Yesterday was our first day back out.

And today, one of our vehicles is in a ditch with failed brakes.

Still, I am grateful.

Grateful this happened in town and not two hours south near the Mozambique border, where help is scarce. In Malawi, there are no tow trucks to call. No emergency roadside services. If you’re stranded, you call your people—or you wait and hope someone kind stops.

People have stopped this morning. But what can they do when there are no brakes?

I find myself reflecting on our drivers. The tenacity. The skill. The calm under pressure. Every day they navigate roads that are unpredictable in vehicles that are often unreliable. Today, our driver’s quick thinking is the reason we are safe. He made a decision in seconds that protected all of us.

And then—thankfully—another driver arrives.

Relief.

We begin transferring everything from the stalled Land Cruiser into the new vehicle—bags, supplies, personal items—working quickly but carefully. The morning has already been long, and the sun is climbing higher. There’s no time to waste.

We pile in, reorganize ourselves, and prepare to get back on the road.

Clinic still calls.

The mechanic will deal with the stranded vehicle. We will deal with the patients waiting two hours south. The team still needs to be picked up. The road still needs to be traveled.

So we continue—shaken, grateful, and more aware than ever of how thin the line can be between routine and disaster.

Today could have gone differently.

But it didn’t.

And so we drive on—toward the Mozambique border, toward clinic, toward purpose—thankful to be safe and determined to finish what we started.