When We Will Be Where

As many of you already know, we leave on Saturday for Tanzania. Well, technically we leave on Saturday for the hotel at the airport in Washington D.C. and on Sunday we leave for Tanzania. We will leave LCR at 2pm on Saturday. We are stopping at Barbara Spencer's sisters home. She has kindly offered to make dinner for us! We will then continue on to our hotel, which is a few minutes drive from the airport. On Sunday morning, at 10am, our flight departs Dulles Airport for Rome, Italy. A few people have commented that Rome is beautiful and we are so lucky to get to go there. We're not exactly going to Rome, but we will be able to tell you whether or not they have a nice runway :) Once we are done refueling in Rome, it is on to Addis Abba, Ethiopia. The entire duration of the flight from Dulles to Ethiopia is 15 hours and 15 minutes (YIKES!), including the stop in Rome. It's a long flight, please keep us in your prayers. From there we have a 4 hour trip to Kilimanjaro, Tanzania. We will depart Addis Abba, stop in Nairobi, Kenya, and then head to our final destination. We arrive in Tanzania at 1:50 pm on Monday, August 3rd. That will be 6:50 am in Philadelphia on August 3rd. It will be over 24 hours of travel by the time we land.

Because Kilimanjaro is several hours away from Irente, we will not be making that drive upon our arrival in Tanzania. Instead, we will be staying in a hotel run and owned by another Lutheran Diocese in Tanzania. It is called Uhuru Hostel and it is located in Moshi, Tanzania. We will spend the night here and then make the journey by car to Irente on Tuesday, August 4th. We are very grateful that we will have this first night to rest and get a good nights sleep in Moshi before traveling the several hours to Irente. Pastor Joyce (the pastor from Irente) will be accompanying the driver to pick us up at Kilimanjaro.

From August 4th through the 13 we will be staying at Tumaini Hostel, which is only a few minutes from Irente. This hostel is run by the North Eastern Diocese of the Lutheran Church in Tanzania. We will go to Irente each day, spending time at both schools, the children's home and the farm. We will worship with them during their Sunday services and Pastor Sharon is even doing a baptism while we are there. We are also visiting SEKUCO, the University while we are there. Our time there is very flexible and will be very "go with the flow" as we spend time with our partner congregation.

From August 14-15 we are going on Safari. We will spend part of the day on August 16th in Arusha, just doing some sightseeing through the city. We depart Tanzania at 4:30 pm on 8/16 at 4:30 pm, which will be 9:30 am your time. We follow the same path home that we took to get there, and land in Washington DC at 7:55am on Monday 8/17.

Thank you for reading and journeying with us to Tanzania!