At Washington Dulles Airport waiting for our delayed flight:
Our plane from Washington DC to Addis Ababa, Eithiopia was delayed four to five hours. Having heard plenty of similar stories from other travels, this was however the first time I have had to deal with a delayed flight. Of course it meant that we missed our flight from Addis Ababa to Lubumbashi. The end result was that instead of three flights taking all together about a day, we had five flights making our trip about 40 hours. We arrived in Addis early afternoon and because we missed our flight we waited till 1am when we caught a plane to Djibouti, Somali from there we flew down to Nairobi, Kenya and then at 9:30am from Nairobi we finally flew to Lubumbashi, DRC.
There was also a young woman from Tennessee with her daughter, who had been on the same flight with us and consequently ended up taking the same circuitous route. It turns out her and her husband are spending three years in the Congo as Methodist missionaries.
When we finally arrived in Lubumbashi I forgot the name of the hotel we were going to stay at, something I usually make sure to write down beforehand, and Vanessa couldn’t find her yellow fever vaccination card. The first problem was solved rather easily when the young lady’s husband, Ruc, intervened and gave the custom officials his address. The second problem took a lot more running around and talking to people. They were going to give Vanessa another yellow fever shot until I finally thought to turn on my computer and show them the scanned copy I had on there.
Then we went to get our bags, and of course they weren’t there. This was also another first for me. It didn’t bother me to much since the only thing I cared about was getting to the hotel and sleeping, but Vanessa swore she would never fly without a change of clothes in her carry on again.
A little bit of an adventure and a few long nights, but we made it and with a good night sleep we were up early and out teaching by 8am Monday morning. And around 1:30 pm the airline called to let us know our bags were in.