Thanks everyone for all of your patience! I will try and go through and give a day by day of what we did while we were in Tanzania. Thank you so much for your prayers while we were away! We left LCR around 2pm on 8/1 following a short time of prayer. Thank you to everyone who joined us that day, or called in, or prayed from wherever you were. We headed to Washington DC in two cars, and stopped at the home of Barb Spencer's sister. She had prepared a wonderful home cooked meal for us. It was a great chance to just relax before going to the hotel. From Barb's sister's we went to our hotel in Herndon, VA. We pretty much went right to bed once we got there. We had to be up at 6am the next day to be at the airport by 8 for our 10am flight, and 6am is earlier for some of us than others. The next day, Sunday, 8/2 we were on our way to the airport by 7am after we raided the continental breakfast bar at the hotel. We were pretty loud and excited on the shuttle to the airort at 7am so we felt kind of badly for the other, not so enthused passengers who were stuck on the same van as us. We did get some interesting looks from those people when we announced to the driver that our airline was Ethiopian Airline. Seriously...it's a real airline with real airplanes! We went through security without any issues, and then went to the gate to wait to board. While we waited we did laps. Because we knew we had the pleasure of sitting for the next 19 hours so we were walking while we could. We also practiced our swahili words, while doing laps. We made the most of our time! After a prayer circle we boarded the plane. And then sat on the runway. And sat. And sat. And sat. It wasn't until much later we found out that there were some wild storms happening farther up north which explained our delay on the runway.
So there we were. Sitting on the plane for the next 19 hours. I don't even remember what we did. We tried to sleep. Some of us did sleep. We read. We played games. We got up and walked. We started to go a little bit crazy. We ate. They fed us so many times. As soon as you get on the plane, they put you on Ethiopian time. So when we boarded, they function as if it is 8pm, because that is what time it was in Ethiopia. So our first meal was dinner because it was dinner time in Ethiopia, even though we thought it was only mid afternoon. The next time we ate we had breakfast. But when that time came around our bodies thought it was midnight and we wanted to go to sleep, not eat omlets. And this might be about the time "going crazy" started to kick in! Although Sandy said she really liked flying. She thought of it as she just got to sit there for all those hours and read and people just kept on bringing her food. That was really a positive spin for us! But I was way past positive spins by the 8th hour. The first leg took us to Rome Italy and it was 8 hours long. In Rome we just stopped to change crews and bring on more food. Lisa jumped in front of the open door when we were in Rome so that she could breathe in Roman air :)
The next leg of the trip took us to Ethiopia. I wish I remembered more about this 6 hours, but we had been awake many, many hours by now! I do know when we landed in Ethiopia there was an airplane graveyard next to the runway. I am not sure whose idea it was to put that next to the runway, but I do know it was not that person's best idea! I also know that we were two hours late getting into Ethiopia and I do know I was a little bit panicked because our next flight was scheduled to take off at 10am and we were not going to land until 9:45am. Fortunately, in Africa, they have this thing we now call "African Time." It is similar to "Yardley Time" but it is a little more extreme. It basically means that you just add like 77 minutes to anytime someone tells you and that is when it will actually happen. It goes for airlines, too, apparantly. When we got to the gate there wasn't even a plane there yet and none of the airline workers seemed very concerned about that. We were so exhausted that some of us just laid down on the airport floor and started to fall asleep. Shortly after this, they called us to board and at noon we were on our way to Tanzania. We were all beyond exhausted at this point. Most of us fell right to sleep on this plane ride. Some of us fell so soundly asleep that we slept right through a layover in Kenya.
Around 4pm (Tanzanian time) on 8/3we landed at Kilimanjaro Internation Airport in Tanzania. It was SO refreshing to breathe in fresh air! The process of going through customs and immigration was quick. We got our luggage, went outside and met Pastor Joyce! It was SO nice to finally be able to put a face to her name. She came with her sister, Happiness, and her two children along with our driver, Dennis. From the airport we went to the Uhuru Hostel in Moshi Tanzania. We spent our first night here. I was SO thankful that we had made the decision NOT to drive all the way to Lushoto this first night. It was still 6 hours away. We were able to go to the hostel, have a nice dinner and get a full night's sleep.
The next day was Tuesday, 8/4, we left Moshi, stopped at the bank to exchange money, and then made the long drive to Lushoto. This was our first of many car rides in Tanzania in which we sat sideways with many people stuffed in the back. As the two weeks went on, we quickly learned the tricks to making this easier! The whole ride to Lushoto was beautiful. It looked like a post card everywhere you looked and we all took a ton of pictures! It is a beautiful country. We were all just so excited to be there and spent the ride talking to Pastor Joyce about LCR, learning more about Irente, and just taking in all the beauty around us. The hours in the car went by much quicker than the hours in the plane!
I felt really guilty about not being able to blog and update while we were in Tanzania, and one of the reasons I felt like that was because I learned once we arrived in Tanzania that our flight tracker had not been accurate. In fact, it had been so inaccurate, that it said that our pilot aborted our flight plan mid flight. This would have meant that our landing occcured somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. I wasn't sure if this was a really tactful way of saying the plane crashed. I know that some of us did sleep through a layover in Kenya, but I can assure you that never once did we land in the Atlantic. We were safe and sound, but if anyone was tracking us they were not given correct information!
Thanks for your prayers and support! More details and photos to come.
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