Road to Rwanda----Arrived!

 We just arrived in Kigali, the caital of Rwanda.  I am pretty tired, but I will write so that you know that we were blessed by your prayers.  It started off eventful.....like usual for us.  As we zipped our carry on's, the zipper on Rick's suitcase broke.  We were starting out hours early, so we quickly drove to Walmart and came home with a new suitcase....but we messed up.  (We bought 2 suitcases in the past 3 days.  Both of them are the same size.  We can't use either one.  One was to replace a smaller bag and we wanted to fit in 70 pounds and it was the same size as the one we were using, so too small.  The one we bought the day of leaving was to replace Rick's carry on and it was too big for that.  I am not sure why we were/have been/may continue to be so spatially challenged that we can't assess the suitcase's size better.  I don't remember having trouble before.  Age?)  However, I just forced the zipper on the carry on backwards and rezipped.  It held fine...until a few minutes ago as we were getting in the van to go from the airport to the hotel.  God.

We arrived at Greenville Spartanburg International to find that our flight had been canceled!  The poor beleagured help desk tried and ended up calling the help line. If we wanted to fly out of Greenville, we would have to wait until August 7.  But Peter, son who had worked all night,  offered to drive to Charlotte, so even though we had told him to leave, we called him up and he hustled on back and drove us ....quickly....the hour + to Charlotte, where we got on a plane an hour later than the one would have left on from Greenville, It was tight to make the connections, but we did. However, as Peter left us at the airport, the visa papers and covid test papers fell out of the manila folder.  Peter found some in the car, and Rick went out and scrounged around in the road in front of the airport and found everything except his antigen test.  We got on the plane and I called the testing facility in Greenville and they sent via PDF Rick's test to my email address. ( We just arrived here to find that all restrictions had been dropped and no one even looked at them...after some very anxious moments on our part.)  

We just made the Greenville/Newark connection, and finally got our business flight.  Not very often does reality live up to expectations, but I need to say, that the flight was marvelous.  Good food, and I just flattened out my bed and slept almost the whole way.  What a tremendous blessing.....except for the slight bout of diarrhea.  But I was mainly over that before the plane took off.  TMI.

We did not have business class for the Brussels/Rwanda portion.  It was Ok, though, because  we had rested so well on the prvious flight, and our bodies felt mainly like it was day time, mainly. 

And absolutely unbelievably, even with the very, very tight connections, all of our luggage came through???? Hallelujah.  Your prayers at work.  

Short impressions as we drove through the nighttime scene in Kigali:  Interesting business signs, "Action Driving and Language School",  "Next Glob Technology", and the traffic cops standing in the middle of the road with assault rifles.  We have a nice local hotel in Kigali, under mosquito nets and with stern warnings not to drink the water.  Tomorrow morning someone ftom the school in Musanze will pick us up and drive the 90 minutes to the school. We will keep you informed of the next steps as we take this Road to Rwanda.