We have arrived!

While we were waiting in the departure hall in Addis we realized that our flight number and destination had been removed from the ‘list of departures’!  There were no announcements of any kind, but when everybody else started queuing up we thought it best to join. It transpired that they were combining two flights into one and even then the Boeing 777 was only half full. We flew to Abuja, the capitol of Nigeria. There the plane was cleaned, new passengers embarked and off we went to N’Djamena.

Rieneke van Rijn had volunteered to pick us up and arrived at the official arrival time to be told, finally, that our flight would arrive three hours late. Customs was easy and after our Yellow Fever documentation was checked we were ready to wait for our suitcases: that took a while but thankfully our luggage showed up (we had been able to have it tagged all the way through from Vancouver). After putting our luggage through an X-ray machine and warding off a bunch of ‘porters’ we had officially arrived in the capitol.

Quite a few of our friends are here, at the SIL center, to take part in a Translation Principles course. A great tradition is for the ‘locals’ to invite new arrivals for the first three meals. It is great not to have to worry about food right away and to be able to catch up on everybody’s lives. We excused ourselves at 8.30 and fifteen minutes later were in bed. Despite the noises around us it did not take long to fall asleep (50 hours of travel will do that to you!)

Our schedule, as of this weekend: we’ll fly to Mongo on Tuesday. There is quite a bit of work awaiting us and we might be there for three or more weeks. 

We found Waldo at Heathrow Airport!

                            Abuja, waiting for the cleaning crew and new passengers. Almost there!