We finally made it!

Well, we thought it may never happen, but we finally arrived in Africa on Monday at about 8:00 PM (around noon your time.) We flew into Entebbe, which is about two and a half hours from Jinja. We were so happy to just be in Africa. The process of getting through customs and everything took about an hour. After all that we went to claim our luggage and couldn’t find any to claim. After a while Megan’s turned up, but Melanie’s never did show up that night. That was a bummer. It took another hour to sit down and file my baggage as missing and then we were finally ready to go. Since we arrived a day later than we were supposed to Megan’s dad was communicating with Amani for us to see if the driver could come get us the next day instead. When he heard back from them he was going to call us. Well, we never did hear back from him before we got out of the country. So, arriving at the airport we were hoping that someone was there to pick us up. Thankfully he was there waiting for us with an Amani Baby Cottage sign in hand. We cannot even begin to explain how good it was to see him and that sign. We finally arrived in Jinja at about 12:30 AM and were starving! There are too many volunteers in the home right now, so we’re staying with the nurse that is a full time volunteer here at Amani. She’s been here for 5 years. She just lives right down the road from the orphanage. God bless her, as she had dinner waiting for us when we pulled up. I think we eventually went to bed around 1:30 and were told to just get some sleep and not worry too much about volunteering tomorrow. Well, we took that to heart. Some other volunteers from the home had to come down and make sure we were still breathing at 4:15 in the afternoon. Needless to say we couldn’t sleep at all the next night. Today was the first day of full on volunteering and we absolutely love it! The kids are wonderful and so loving and adorable. At the home there are full time employees that care for the children everyday and they call them “mamas”. The volunteers are called “auntie” or “uncle”. Auntie Megan and Auntie Melanie are our new names around Amani. We’re learning the new terms around the home. The most common ones used that we have caught on very quickly are “su su” and “ca ca”, which means pee and poop. Megan had her first ca ca explosion this morning. Those cloth diapers are a lot different than disposable diapers. We were able to walk into to town twice today. It was a great experience. The town is very cute and we can’t wait to get more familiar with it. If you’ve never been to Africa it’s definitely not the Africa you envision in your head. The internet doesn’t work very well here and we are trying to update the blog as often as we can, so please bare with us! Thanks for your continued support and prayers!

We love and miss you all!

Megan and Melanie



Melanie and her long-lost bags!