July 9th

July 9^th

Early to rise and off to Nairobi to do a little shopping before our long flight back to the states. We have some Kenyan shillings we need to get rid of!

It was a tearful goodbye. We bought pineapple for the kids. They haven't had that for years. We all received so many letters from individual kids at Fiwagoh. My little buddies were Isaac, Goffrey and Ngugi. My older buds were Duncan, John and Duncan. We lined up all 180 kids and gave each one an individual hug so no one got left out. There was several tears shed. We were so thankful to Pastor Benson and his wife Florence for their love and care towards us.

We stopped at the Great Rift Valley and took some pictures of the valley below.

We drove to a jewlery making factory name Kaszuri and watch them make the beads. Jewelery from this factory is being sold in Boston and other American boutiques. It is mostly single mothers from Kenya making the jewlery for a sustaining income.

On the way to the airport we stopped and shopped at the Masai market. This place is crazy if you have white skin, even if you don't. You can't even think straight with men in your face wanting you to buy all their products. You also have to bargain with them which can be annoying and lengthy. Kirk would be proud of me. I got one product down from 6,500 shillings to 2,500 shillings. That is the difference between 76 dollars and 29 dollars plus he threw in a toy for my kids!

We are now at the airport. We had a super long line to go through security, another long line to check in and another long line to go through customs. We are now waiting at the gate.

We are about to fly to Ethiopia which will take 2 hours. We then have a layover in Ethiopia. We fly out of Ethiopia at 10pm and arrive in Washington D.C at 8:40am. We are going to be tired but too excited to care. I hope they have mexican restaurants in the DC airport! I miss mexican food, icecream and everything with sugar and diet coke!!

As usual on this trip...God intervened. We drove for 2 hours to get to Nairobi. Our flight was supposed to leave at 5:30pm. It was delayed until 7:15pm. It takes two hours to fly to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Our connecting flight left at 10 which means they start boarding internationally an hour earlier. Once we got off our flight from Nairobi we had to sprint to get to our next flight to get home. Ethiopian Air does not fly to DC everyday so we were very upset at the thought of staying a few more days. Once we got to security there was such a long line. Thank you God that the security guys knew we were going to miss our flight and let all of us going to DC jump in front of security and then continue to run from there to catch our flight. There were 5 of us that were left behind. All of us were on the plane just waiting and praying that they would get on and at the 11^th hour they did. They closed the doors and we were off. The plane was not going to wait any longer. I can't believe it was that close!

Embarking on our 17 hour flight home......