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…
Here was the airfield…
This was our plane, operated by Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF)…
Kampala, Uganda (aka home sweet home for the next three months)…
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!
