Wed, June 4
Alternately Titled: Four Flights, Three Airlines, Two Red-Eyes and A Very Long Journey
Well, I finally arrived in Windhoek, Namibia and made it to the hostel that we are staying in for the duration of our orientation week. After flying from JFK to Dulles, I got my bags and headed to the international terminal to meet up with the WorldTeach group.
Around 10:45pm we took off for Doha on a red-eye and I slept for the majority of the flight. At first I was a little worried about sleeping, as there were 4 infants seated in my vicinity and they were all crying before take-off. We had a few hours to kill in the Doha airport before taking off on our next red-eye flight to Jo’berg.
Luckily, this flight was not full (like the flight to Qatar) and we had plenty of room to spread out and choose our own seats. Once the flight was underway, there were a handful of us that were well-rested from the first red-eye and after the movie we all ended up sitting together in the same row and drinking beer and wine for a couple of hours. Eventually, Dana (a 20yr old NYU student) and I kicked people out of our row so that we could get some sleep.
In Jo’berg, we had a four hour lay-over until our flight to Windhoek and by this time the entire group wanted nothing more than to be done with flying. We found an airport café to lounge in and waited for our flight. Unfortunately, when it was finally time to pull back from the runway, the captain notified us that he had good news and bad news – the good news was that we could pull away from the gate, but the bad news was that there were geese on the runway and that all flights were being diverted to another runway, resulting in a 45 minute delay. I guess we have arrived in Africa!
In addition, to having long flights, the time difference from DC to Doha was 7 hours ahead, then we fell back to 6 hours in Jo’berg and then upon arrival in Namibia we settled on a 5 hour difference. It was quite confusing for a while!
At the airport Maggie (Program Director) and Jocie (currently on an extended one-year program, will be taking over for Maggie in Sept) met us and we all got on the bus to head to our hostel. It was a bit challenging because the bus was like a school bus and there was no luggage area (or even doors) in the back. I do feel somewhat relieved, as I felt like most people had a comparable amount of luggage as I did. I guess all of us over-packed!
Once we got to our hostel, the group that I have bonded with (Dana, Laura, Eric, Brian, Cat) took charge and started an assembly line to unload the luggage from the bus. By the time that we got into the hostel, we didn’t have much choice over our beds and I ended up in a dorm style room with 11 other girls. Since there are only 6 guys, they had they own room. There was also another dorm style girl’s room and two other girls were lucky enough to have their own room with a bathroom.
We had about an hour to relax and then we started our orientation with the Name Game and finding our towns and villages on a map of Namibia. We had dinner and two different dance groups came to the hostel to perform for us. First was a Tswana Dance Group that is made up of at-risk youth and they performed traditional African dances and singing. Next we had a Capoiera group perform – it’s a cross between martial arts and dance. The guys were great and they stayed and hung out with us for a while.
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