Finally Here!

Friday, May 18^th 2:00 am

I knew that the flight was long…I just didn’t realize it was that long. I left my house for O’Hare around 9:15 am on Wednesday morning. We finally arrived at Red Chili a little after 1 am on Friday morning, which would have been 5 pm Thursday night at home (32 hours of travel!). The flight from Detroit to Amsterdam was about 8 hours long and I watched a movie, tried to sleep to no avail, ate some airplane food, and read a book. During our layover in Amsterdam we all were able to get some Wi-Fi connection, but felt like an exhibit at the zoo because everyone looked at us as soon as we pulled our computers out, like we were some crazy Americans. We had to go through security again and then boarded the plan to fly to Kigali (7.5 hours) where we stayed on the plane and then flew a half hour back up to Entebbe. I was actually able to sleep some on this flight, read some more, and played a few games. Sitting for that long was definitely not my idea of fun, but we finally landed in Uganda around 10:15 pm Ugandan time. Here we had to go through customs and buy our visas, which was extremely inefficient, and collect our bags. Fortunately we had no missing bags or issues with our flights and there were several Ugandans waiting for us once we exited the airport to greet us and help us with our bags.

Here we boarded the bus and got to see exactly what we had gotten ourselves into. As we began our drive from Entebbe to Kampala, we quickly noticed that there weren’t a lot of rules on the road, there were many random buildings mixed in with vast vegetation, and even though there were streetlights lining the roads none of them were on. As we got closer to Kampala we began to see more city lights and even heard music playing from the occasional building or two. We stopped just before arriving at Red Chili to pick up bottled water to tie us over for the night and then were on our way to our new “home”.

I’m not quite sure what we were expecting to find, but I think it’s safe to say it’s a little more rustic than most of us expected. Dani, Megan, Micah and I are staying in the cottage called Congo where we have two bedrooms, a bathroom, kitchen, and sitting area. We did find several bugs, which I successfully killed, one being a HUGE mosquito, that when I hit the first time, splattered blood everywhere. And although we were nervous to take a shower, once we figured out how to work it, I think after we all definitely felt cleaner and refreshed. The only real struggle was remembering to keep our mouths closed and when it came time to brushing our teeth we had to use the bottled water. I think saying we experienced a little bit of a greater appreciation for home and a slight culture shock even just being in country for a couple hours would be an understatement. Now it’s time to crawl into our mosquito nets with our bug spray on and try to settle down for at least a little bit of sleep before our bright and early morning!