I left Houston on Sunday, May 8th with my amazing team members on Lufthansa Airlines.  Our itinerary took us to Frankfurt, Germany; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and it was supposed to then take us to Entebbe, Uganda.  However, from Addis we had a surprise stop in Kigali, Rwanda.  It added about 3 hours to our overall travel time, which meant that we arrived in Uganda and cleared customs at around 4:00 am on Tuesday, and had only a few hours to lay down at the guest house before we were to be back up and at the Kajjansi airstrip.  Whew! God blessed me with a wee bit o’sleep here and there, but my body was screaming at me by the time I hit the matress. 

On Tuesday morning, after lying down and talking for only a couple of hours, we ate breakfast and reloaded our luggage to head for our plane.  My stomach was very upset from taking Malarone without food, and I was exhausted from traveling.  Elizabeth gave me a Phenergan, which is for nausea, but also causes extreme drowsiness…at least it did for me.  In fact, Phenergan was like a tranquilizer dart to my system!!

So, I only took SIX pictures for the ENTIRE day before I slipped into the coma.  Here was a tropical tree at the Kajjansi airstrip…

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Here was the airfield…

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This was our plane, operated by Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF)…

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Kampala, Uganda (aka home sweet home for the next three months)…

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Seeing Kampala from the air was the last thing that I clearly remember from the whole day! I fell asleep shortly after take-off, and I did wake up when we arrived in a northern Uganda town called Arua, where we had to clear customs and receive new stamps on our passports for Sudan! We climbed back onto the plane, I fell asleep, and then nothing. 

Allegedly, we flew through a very bumpy storm that made a few team members nervous; allegedly, we landed in a village in Sudan called Rumbek, where allegedly the whole team disembarked for refueling.  If I got off of the plane, I DO NOT remember any of it.  Then I sort of remember landing in Tonj, and there are some fuzzy memories of raindrops and hand-shaking, then nothing.  Later, we allegedly toured the IDAT compound and met everyone…I have no recollection of this.  There’s a fuzzy memory of all of us sitting at the dinner table, and me introducing myself, and then radio silent.

What a first evening in Sudan!

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