Kenya Arrival

After about 28 hours of travel, including 3 hours in a car, 16 hours in flight and way too much time waiting in airports, it dawned on me big-time:  I am a long ... long ... LONG way from home.  This isn't the other side of town or even the state.  This is literally the other side of the globe.  That's some serious distance.

I was also thinking that one has to be crazy to leave a comfortable home, a wife and family, and all the familiarity of everything, to cram oneself into a couple of winged metal tubes with lots of other people for many hours at a time, enduring the stuffy heat of an airplane cabin and the sleeplessness that air travel and crossing several time zones involves, finally to arrive at nearly midnight into a faraway place where you don't know what to expect and everything is unknown.

So you have to either be crazy ... or called.  The missionaries that do this all the time are definitely called.  I still think I am more on the crazy side.  But whatever the reason, here I am.

"Here" is the Biblical Conference Center in Nairobi, Kenya, where we will stay tonight and possibly tomorrow night depending on how we are feeling tomorrow.

Flights were uneventful and even the customs and passport control in the Nairobi Airport was no problem.  We were clued in ahead of time to take a small package of wet wipes along, as they will mark luggage for further inspection with large chalk X marks if they want the customs people to look at them further.  Two of our bags came off the baggage claim festooned with X marks, and we dutifully scrubbed them off before leaving the baggage claim area.  They must have seen the pipe sections and fittings we had distributed amongst those bags. Once the bags were clean, there were no further questions.  I am thankful all the bags arrived.  The one I had to check had all my clothing, a camera lens, all the batteries and the remote for my drone, my toothbrush, my work gloves and hat, and probably a few other essentials.  It would not have been fun to be without it.

Walking out of the airport into the warmth of the evening, it was good to see Dave and Joy waiting for us.  Their driver, George, loaded the bags into the van and it was about a 25-minute drive here to the compound.

Time to get some shut-eye, as I have been up since early Friday morning and it is now Saturday, about midnight.  I'm feeling it.

Note to self:  This isn't the US anymore.  Use only bottled water to drink and brush teeth.