Getting to Uganda

Here is what happened on the first two days of our trip: we traveled. The traveling is definitely not the exciting part of the trip [shocker], so I’ll summarize and try to highlight the important things.

First of all, I worked on Monday morning. I mean, I was distracted and not focused, but I tried my best to work on Monday morning. Why? See, we were gone from Monday, October 4 to Thursday, October 14, so that’s 9 work days. I only get 2 weeks of vacation for the year, so it doesn’t take an accountant to calculate that it’s about all of my vacation. Now, the people that I work for are wonderful and so they’ve told me that I can work extra around Christmas to have some time off, plus I get one floating holiday, plus I got to treat one day of our trip as a “QDay” for community service. So I’m still going to get a whole week off at Christmas. :-) God gave me an amazing job.

Anyway, so I left work around noon and went back to my place to change clothes, put the last few things in my bag, and try to eat lunch. My stomach was it knots – I wasn’t scared, but I was definitely full of anticipation. I just wanted to go ahead and GO! My sister dropped me off at the airport, and even risked getting her car towed to help me get my massive suitcases into the airport. Check-in went fine, and my bags were both under-weight (I had prayed over them on the way to the airport because I wanted everything in them to get to Uganda).

You could tell how excited and nervous everyone was as we waited for our flight to Detroit. [On that flight, we had probably the rudest flight attendant in the history of flight attendants. I think she was mad that her parents had named her Bertha.] I got to sit with my friend Ashley on all of our flights. If you don’t know her, you’re missing out. She’s awesome. We didn’t know each other before we went to Uganda last year, but now she is one of my closest friends. I don’t exactly know when it happened, but over the course of lots of lunches and dinners at Olive Garden, we have bonded over our love for Jesus and Uganda. Basically, God knitted our hearts together, and it’s awesome.

(Ashley took this with her iphone right before we left Detroit for Amsterdam!)

On the 8 hour flight from Detroit to Amsterdam, I tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to sleep in my window seat. I watched Toy Story 3, and laughed out loud at Ken and Barbie. I think I also watched the original Toy Story and 101 Dalmatians. Yes, my movie taste is similar to that of an 8 year old girl, and that’s ok with me. We had a short (2 hours, maybe?) layover in Amsterdam where we just walked around. Oh, and Ashley found my boyfriend – a fat man wearing pants with the outline of Africa in bright colors all over them…can you say “SCORE!”? Before we knew it, we were on another 8 hour flight, this time down to Entebbe. We got off the airplane around 8pm-ish (Uganda time) and got our bags, and then stood in a massive line to have them put our bags through an X-ray machine before we could exit the airport. It was pretty strange.

Last year, we left the airport and went directly to a hotel just a few miles away instead of making the drive to the guest house in Jinja. This year, though, Pastor Godfrey wanted us to make it to the guest house since we were going to jump right into a day of ministry the next day. So we loaded up the bus and drove to Jinja. It was dark, so we couldn’t see much on the drive, but just knowing that we were finally in Uganda had my heart pounding. Smooth was definitely right when he told us “Uganda gets inside of you.” I felt like I was coming home after almost a year away.

I think that we got there sometime after midnight, and I’ve never been so exhausted and excited at the same time. I was thankful that the traveling was done (until the trip home), and incredibly excited about what was going to happen over the next week!