Day 1

Day One was a travel day (and a half). Our 3 PM flight out of Detroit was delayed due to bad weather in Newark - where we were to fly in order to catch our international flight. Eventually, we were rebooked on a direct flight to Frankfurt, Germany and left Detroit around 5:30 PM. We arrived in Germany @ 7:30 in the morning and had plenty of time to make the connecting flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia which left at 10 AM. However unknown to us, the other half of our team was still stranded in Newark - they didn't arrive in Ethiopia until Thursday morning. Due to some miscommunication, the people who were to pick us up weren't at the airport to meet us. (They were under the impression that the whole group wouldn't arrive until Thursday morning.) Since we didn't know who was actually picking us up, we waited for about a couple of hours before trying to call anyone.

In the meantime we had some pretty interesting experiences at the airport. At first the customs officials were refusing to let us bring in the 7 bags of Little Dresses we had with us into the country. They had all sorts of 'reasons' why we couldn't bring them in, but what it came down to was they wanted some sort of payment. And since I was the one in our group of 5 who knew the most Amharic (maybe 10 words total), we knew we were in big trouble! But in the end, it all worked out. Someone showed up to take us to the guest house and the officials relented and let us take all the bags. We loaded everything into the van and drove to the guest house. We got settled in and headed to bed around 29 hours after we left Detroit.