From Africa

Hello family and friends,

Joyce and I are in Iringa, Tanzania, Africa, and our “adventure” has begun.
The story of how we got here, however, is filled with twists and turns!

This blogpost covers what may turn out to be one of the most challenging travel experiences we’ve had, but let me start from the beginning. Actually, the flight from Boston to Amsterdam went very smoothly. We parked the car in Natick, caught the Logan Express which dropped us off in front of the terminal, jumped through the usual hoops for any plane trip, took off on time, landed on time, and after a night of dozing on the 6 hour flight to Schipol Airport in Amsterdam, started Wednesday by meeting our traveling companions in the boarding area for the KLM flight to Dar Es Salaam. Our group consists of 11 people – 5 of my seminary classmates and 6 others, wives, soon-to-be wives, and one widow. Once again, everything went smoothly (with only a minor problem discovered in the braking system of the airplane which delayed our pushback by an hour) and we settled in for what we thought would be the longest stretch of the trip – 11 hours of flying to Kilimanjaro, where we were scheduled for a quick stop over before another quick flight to Dar.

As the plane landed in Kilimanjaro and was being re-fueled, the captain came on the speaker with the following announcement, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we have just learned that many bombs have just exploded near the airport in Dar Es Salaam. This appears to be an accident at a military ammunition dump located near the airport, but there has been some damage to the airport and it has now been closed. We hope this is a temporary and brief condition, and as soon as the airport is reopened, we will be on our way!” The situation went rapidly downhill from there! The situation in Dar was far worse than had been thought. 25 people were killed, many were injured, and the airport was closed until further notice. KLM responded beautifully, arranging for hotel accommodations in Arushu and bus transport to the hotel (a long hour north of Kilimanjero), but when we got there, the scene was chaotic. 50 people crowded around the reservation desk, each one wanting priority attention from two desk clerks who couldn’t find any room keys, and were taking the attitude (not uncommon here) that they would get to us in their own sweet time and in the random order they would chose! It was now 3:30am on Thursday (we lost a day somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean). We finally got into our rooms and fell into bed to a fitful few hours of sleep. How do you shut your mind off after such an abrupt turn of events and sleep well? We didn’t! We kept thinking, ‘our families and friends are going to see this on CNN and we have absolutely no way to communicate with them that we are OK!’. The next morning, we were able to use the hotel’s internet cafe’ to communicate, but the problem was we had little to tell anybody. The airline was giving us mixed messages at best, and so we took the bull by the horns and hired a bus to drive us to Iringa. We waited until noon for the bus to arrive, and then set out for what turned out to be a sixteen hour trip over “roads” that were made up of mostly holes and speed bumps held together by random strands of asphalt over which our driver bounced at what to us seemed breakneck speed. We arrived at the Lutheran Center in Iringa at 5am and literally fell into bed! We are in Africa!!