Well, it has definitely been an adventure. And we’ve only been gone a few days! Sunday, I said a rushed goodbye to my family as they headed to Kev’s graduation. Wooo, yay Kev!
Jordan drove me to the airport where I met the rest of my group. Our first flight was from Memphis to Atlanta. One of the girls in our group, Lacey, had never flown before. Her seat was actually by one of the flight attendants. He was (Kevin voice) “so sweet” and talked to Lacey the whole time. He even announced to the whole plane that we had a special group on board and explained what we were doing. Everyone clapped for us. When we were about to land, the flight attendant told us all the places to eat. When he said On The Border, we all got excited and decided to eat there. Little did we know, the time change would mess with us already. We thought we had two hours before our next flight, but we really only had one. Half our group went to eat, not thinking anything of it. We had a lot of fun people watching, laughing at the people running to their connecting flights. As we were finishing our meal, I got a text from Dr. Weaver asking where we were and that our flight was boarding. After texting her back, she replied with, “Run to E31. RUN.” And we did. We threw enough money down to more than cover our ticket and sprinted out of there. OTB was in concourse T. Our flight was in E, the farthest one away! We ran up stairs and escalators, road the tram all the way around to E, ran up more stairs and escalators, and sprinted 31 gates to make our flight. When we got there, only the people flying stand by were waiting. We made it, and we decided we’d never laugh at another running person again!

Our next flight was from Atlanta to D.C. Nothing exciting happened on the flight, but when we went to pick up our bags, we had our first casualty. One of Dr. Weaver’s bags was completely destroyed. It looked like it had been ripped, chewed, and melted. So after getting that cleared up, we were ready to head to the hotel. We were finally settled in around 2am. Woke up around 6 and headed back to the airport.

We made a few friends while we were waiting for our flight to leave including Elijah (“Captain Cute”, age 2) and Leah (“Mommy, those girls are all so pretty!” age 3), a group of 5 other college students headed to an orphanage in Malawi, and a youth and campus minister from Georgia and his group. Our flight was about 15 hours long. I moved to sit by myself to have more room so it wasn’t a very exciting trip. I watched the in flight movies (The Box- terrible. Percy Jackson- enjoyable. Leap Year- already seen it.) and tried to sleep a little. The light above me was not working so I couldn’t read! Sad day. When we were about 2 hours out of our first stop, I enjoyed watching the flight tracker and I pulled out some old tunes (Camminando, anyone?). That stop was in ROMA. It made my heart ache! Only about 3 hours away from Gallo’s and I couldn’t go!! We couldn’t even get of the plane. Luckily, they opened one of the back doors so I went and stood by it a second to breathe in some good ole Italian air. After refueling and changing the flight crew, we left Rome and headed to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I moved seats so I could read some, but I ended up spending most of my time looking out the window. At one point, I looked out and it really hit me where I was going. I saw the Nile River! We followed it for a long time and I had fun pretending all the tiniest dots I saw were really herds of elephants. Addis Ababa is huge. It was a fun place to look at from the plane. It had flat farmlands, countryside, mountains, and city. When we landed we literally had about 5 minutes until our next plane was supposed to leave. Luckily, a few other people from our flight were also on our next one so they held the plane for us. This flight was our last one! It took about 6 hours to get to Lusaka, because we also made a pit stop in Zimbabwe, which I have absolutely no memory of.... I was OUT! When we finally made it to Lusaka, we found that because of our delayed flight to Addis Ababa and only having about 5 minutes to change planes, 7 of our bags (none of mine, though) did not make it. Hopefully they will arrive tomorrow, but you never can tell. Here is a picture of what our group shirts look like:

We were met by Roy Merritt and Robbie who drove us to our hotel. They work on the Namwianga Mission and were so nice! Robbie told us he is in charge of making sure we have internet there. He says some days we will love him and other days we’ll not like him too much. Now we’re in our very nice hotel (yes, I took the picture below of our room!) and about to go eat dinner! Thanks for all the prayers and support! Love!