Life is in the journey

If life is all about the journey, we are really living! The short of it is that we have arrived in Mangochi, safe and sound after four long days of travel. The long of it is in the paragraphs below…

One of the biggest reasons I wanted to blog on this trip was because I had trouble finding resources for traveling 1. With kids 2. Without money 3. To this area. So, I will start by emphasizing that the best way to describe the journey is to borrow a little vernacular from the tween crowd and say…O  M  G.

We left Columbia Sunday afternoon at 3:30 pm. An overnight in STL and then off to the airport at 5:30 am where we caught our flight to DC. May I recommend the proximate Air and Space Smithsonian (offsite from the Smithsonian campus) for long layovers at Dulles? It’s essentially two ginormous hangers full of flying contraptions, which were pretty cool.

Now, one of the greatest advances in air travel (aside from the Concorde, which is moot now, anyway) is the inflight entertainment system. Except when it doesn’t work, like on this trip across the ocean. No movies, no games, and in an engineering genius move, it also meant that the cabin lights stayed on until 2am because they were controlled by the same system. Yikes. Eventually, we arrived in Johannesburg (happy birthday, Grant!), where we slept at a lovely Inn from 10:30 pm until 2 am, which was when the kids decided to wake up for the day. Double yikes.

On to Malawi on Wednesday morning, where we stayed at a hostel that caters to other long-haired freaky people.

The bus to Mangochi leaves at 6 am, so we were there, bright and early on Thursday morning. In developing nation fashion, we waited until we were loaded with at least 2 people for every seat before we left. Thank goodness, because after 4.5 hours sitting on a hot, fragrant bus listening to Mark singing “I’ve got two tickets to paradise….” we were all ready to move on.

Mangochi seems to be a fine place to reside the next 4-6 weeks. The hospital staff is working to make us comfortable and we are walking a fine line between being culturally reasonable while meeting some basic needs for the kids. Getting a fan is a first order of business today, cost be damned, as we don’t recall ever having been as hot as we were last night.

Early comments from the kids:
Grant: “ It’s a little bit embarrassing, but kind of cool, to always get attention because you’re different.”
Lydia: “I think we should move to Africa until Grant, Iris and me are grown-ups.”
Iris: “Milk.  Milk.”

Be back with an update soon.

The bus ride to Mangochi

Playing in the rain in Blantyre