Traveling to Zambia (Austin)

I awoke Saturday morning to Matt and his freshly shaved head staring down at me. He was wearing one of our custom made ”STS” T-shirts and coaxing me to get up; it was 4am. As I was stumbling through the living room to go to the bathroom I could see Jami in the dining room clipping papers into our lesson plan binders while Matt returned to weighing luggage. At about a quarter till 5am Rich shows up to help us load our luggage into his car and drive us the 3 hours north to JFK airport. We took turns being Rich’s co-pilot while the others napped ... wait let me rephrase that, we attempted to take turns then all of us promptly fell asleep 10 minutes later. Rich was kind enough to let us nap until we arrived at JFK. We said our very gracious goodbyes to Rich and then proceed inside to get our tickets and check luggage. The best way I can explain our 13 hour flight from New York to South Africa is a combination of awakeness, followed by movies, followed by napping, followed by some light reading, followed by some airline food, followed by some more movies.

The next morning, after we finally landed in Johannesburg, South Africa, we had planned to meet up with Jill, who had taken separate flights from Tennessee. But not before I was harassed by the airport security for having too many batteries in a single bag. FYI: 16 batteries in one bag = bad, 16 batteries scattered in 4 bags = quite alright. So after my little battery debacle, we met up with Jill and I was introduced to both her and a giant fake giraffe in the airport terminal lobby. Jill later described our connecting flight as, “waiting in the terminal lobby for the bus, so we could wait on the bus for a bus driver, so we could wait outside the airplane for the pilot, so we could wait on the airplane for takeoff”. Luckily the 2nd plane ride was only about 3 hours long and we slept almost the time.

After we landed in Ndola, Zambia we had to go through customs to get our visa’s before we could officially enter the country. It was quite funny explaining to the security guard who was checking my baggage that all the toys I had packed in my suitcase were my “personal games” and weren’t going to be sold or gifted to anyone. Once outside Jami, Matt, Jill, & I waited for Johnny (who lives in Zambia at Dr. Thinus' house) to come pick us up. Johnny arrives with a taxi about 10 minutes later and after some luggage Tetris we head off towards the town of Mufulira and Dr. Thinus’s house. Now as a first time international traveler it did take some getting used to the fact that cars drive on the left side of the road but that driving anomaly quickly took a backseat to the fact that African drivers will just drive on whatever side of the road has less pot holes so really we were driving on the right side of the road half that time anyway.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful as Dr. Thinus wasn’t going to be arriving until the next day so when we arrived at his house we just unloaded our stuff rested from our long trip.

-Austin