Guess who’s back from Africa! That’s right, it’s me! As many people want to hear about the trip, I’ve decided to use this blog as an opportunity to do a detailed recap so that I don’t have to tell the same stories over and over, or decide exactly what to share. I can just direct people here. For the next two weeks, I will be writing a post a day, detailing a different day of the trip. I’ll include a summary of what we did, some excerpts of my 86-page journal, and other thoughts in general. I’ll try to keep it to the interesting stuff.
Today we begin with Thursday, June 20 and Friday, June 21. I’m combining these two days because I spent the majority of them sitting on airplanes or in airports. We left early in the morning on Thursday and arrived in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, on Friday afternoon. We spent the night at a guest house, which is kind of like a hostel.
The trip was long, but we didn’t run into any major difficulties, thank goodness. I didn’t get much of a first impression of Africa because we got there in the late afternoon and didn’t leave for the guest house until after dark. The few impressions I got were of a poor, underdeveloped country and a people who were working as hard as they could simply to survive.
From Friday night:
“Jim said that after a trip to a third world country, the smells and the feel of the place would be what stuck and I can see why. But I think what I’ll remember most are the sounds. I’m outside the guest house in Monrovia right now, and there is a group practicing music for the church (I found out after that it was an all-night prayer service, not a music practice.). It’s unlike any I’ve ever heard. The bugs make a soothing background noise. The cars honk as they drive. And the accents are melodic, if a little hard to understand.”
I don’t really have much more than that to add. So I’ll sign off for today and be back tomorrow with the next recap post!
Kate G. Jameson 