So this show, like all of Atlas Obscura, is about exploring the world, discovering

its many wonderful hidden little corners.

And we tend to center things around place, but so many times, the most memorable experience

of a place is the person that you met there.

We wanted to kind of invert the normal order today and ask the question, who's a memorable

person you met while traveling?

It's a question we'll want to revisit with other folks, but today, we're starting with

friend of the Atlas, David Platz.

Today, I'm going to tell you about Martin Tom, a Pentecostal minister I met in Malawi

back in the early 2000s, who saved me and in a way I helped save him too.

We first, some words from our sponsors.

Back in 2003, I was just about to have my second kid, my then wife was very pregnant,

I had a chance for one kind of last work trip and I spent a couple of days in Ethiopia

and then I was going to fly to Zimbabwe and it turns out that you cannot get from Ethiopia

to Zimbabwe directly, or at least you couldn't then, it involved a whole bunch of flights

and it was complicated.

That was flying from Ethiopia to Uganda and then to Zimbabwe.

So we landed it the long way, which turns out as the capital of Malawi and that was where

I was going to get the final leg of my trip, which was to go to Zimbabwe.

So we pulled into the long way airport at the middle of the day and there were no other

planes at the airport, so I'm like, huh, that's curious, I'm supposed to catch a flight

in like an hour, it's weird, but whatever, I'm sure it'll, it's coming.

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