3 weeks in....

Greetings from Lesotho, the Kingdom in the Sky, the Switzerland of Africa, the farthest possible point on the globe from a decent sushi joint!

So, my adventure so far:

I arrived in Philly on Monday, Nov. 10th. The Peace Corps put us up in the Sheraton University city- not bad digs considering what I imagined I was getting myself into. Went out that night with Phil, another trainee who got in that night. Had a few beers, had a few more, sang Otis Redding songs on the corner with some random drunk guy, as you do. The next day was Staging, a full afternoon of icebreakers and your standard don't-do-anything-stupid lectures. There are 19 of us, 11 girls and 8 guys, and thankfully I'm not the oldest one in the group. We have two older women who are back for their second tour in the PC, one of whom was in Liberia back in '64. I can't imagine how different the overall structure of the PC must be now in comparison. Anyway, most of us went out that night for pizza and beers, then went to sleep fairly early.

Wednesday morning, we all convene with all of our baggage in the hotel lobby. The chaos wasn't helped by the fact that there was also a group if 40 new trainees headed to Kenya at the same time. We had to take a bus from Philly to JFK, a bus that was apparently being driven by a guy who had just arrived in the northeast. I don't know how familiar all of you are with the Philly-JFK route, but let's just say that there's no good reason why we had to drive trough Manhatten. Even considering the fact that he had already made a massive detour, the driver still wouldn't let me get off the bus to get a hotdog. He also knocked off his side mirror in a tunnel (which had to be fixed at one of the seediest-looking mechanics I've ever seen, while we sat and waited. A few more minor collisions later, and we were at JFK.

Now, at this point, I had been in Mother Hen mode since about 4 in the morning when I got up. I, along with 3 others, was in charge of making sure that everyone stayed together, got their passports, etc. Maybe it's the elementary school teacher in me, but I was stopping every 2 minutes to do a head count, and then having minor panic attacks when people hadn't come through security yet because they had gone outside for one last smoke. Thankfully, we all made it on the plane- 17 hours to JoBerg via Dakar. The flight was fairly uneventful, with nobody getting thrown off the flight for drunk and disorderly conduct, despite best efforts. Once we landed in JoBerg, we went right to our hotel shuttle after customs- as we were flying out the very next morning, our baggage was spending the night at the airport.

We were shuttled over to the Southern Sun Hotel, just around the corner from the airport. Bless the PC for its paranoia in wanting to keep us close to the airport, because this is one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed at (not saying much, but still). This is the kind of the place where you walk into the lobby and they hand you a glass of wine and point you towards the cheese & crackers tray. We checked in, showered (we were all more than a little rank by now), and met for a kickass buffet dinner. A few of us stayed up for a while, but we had to be up early, so I was asleep by 11, then up by 3. We had to take 3 separate shuttles to the airport, as some people took their sweet time getting downstairs. Once we all checked in, we headed to the gate, only losing Kelly once (a remarkable feat, as she tends to wander off). Once at the departure lounge, we handed in our tickets to board the bus that would take us to our sardine can with wings. All of us, that is, except for John. For some reason, when he got to the gate, John had his boarding pass, but not his actual ticket. After wrangling with the gate agents, John ended up running back out to the ticket counter, buying himself a new ticket, and then sprinting back to the bus with about 30 seconds to spare. Soaked in sweat, he joined us on the bus (interesting postscript to this story, we found the ticket last week. Apparently, it was in Phil's bag).

We waited for about 20 minutes, watching as the ground crew struggled to cram all of our bags onto this tiny little prop plane.

More later, my internet time is up!