Traveling

Please pray for some visitors who are coming to Karamoja in the next week - with all these travel restrictions now, it must not be very fun. Can you imagine arriving in Africa with no carry-on and then finding out that your luggage didn't make it?? (I recommend not flying Minneapolis-Chicago-London if you want your luggage to arrive with you, by the way.) So pray that their bags get there, too!

When I left in May, Bob and Rachel were going to take me to the airport on a Tuesday, but the disarmament in Tekora caused a change of plans. So Sunday night I frantically began packing (after 5 weeks a lot of stuff accrues...) and then watched a last few episodes of Lost and made a midnight snack with Rachel (who was spending the night, since she couldn't go to Kampala) and one of the Wrights' two visiting friends who was going to leave the next day, too.

We got dropped off in Mbale the next day, where we ate at the Mt Elgon hotel (good food, but we had to watch part of Jersey Girl and Dogtown while we waited). Then we got a ride to the capital in the CURE hospital ambulance, which was the first time I've ever ridden in one. (It was stuffed full of people - not sick - and luggage, and there wasn't much leg room, so the novelty wore off pretty fast. But still...) That night we ate pizza at an Italian outdoor restaurant and slept in a guest house where there were candles and matches beside each bed. Which was a good thing, because my room happened to not have electricity even though it was a night with power. :)

The next day one of the other visitors and I went shopping at the craft market and loaded up our suitcases even more with all kinds of fun stuff, including mzungu t-shirts. We also hung out with the Proctor family at the ARA, which was fun - I hadn't seen them at all on this trip but had stayed with them for a few days before. Then the Wrights' friends got dropped off and Charles, the director at CURE, and I got rooms at a luxurious hotel on the shore of Lake Victoria - although I would rather have done without the luxury, as it was rather a shock to pay almost 200,000 shillings ($100) for a hotel in Uganda, and that was with a CURE discount. Still, having hot water was nice!

So everything worked out well in spite of my being sure it would be awful having a change of plans like that. :-P Everything went extremely smoothly and according to plan with my overnight stay in London (which including seeing Les Miserable in the theater...although sadly I dozed through parts at the end). And then in Chicago there were weather delays. So I missed my flight in Minneapolis (another reason not to make an extra US stop, no matter how much cheaper!), and was, with jet-lag and all, a very disappointed girl. It's hard to come grips with the fact that I can't control everything, no matter how well I think I've planned things! But thankfully God doesn't have a plan B - this was in it all along, and it ended up being okay. I didn't make it home that night, but got on another flight into Bozeman that arrived at 11:30 pm (thanks to more weather delays). But at that point I didn't care anymore; I just was glad to be back in Montana. If you can't be in Uganda, that's the other great place to be. :)