Friday, December 8 – Arriving

The day began with our arrival at Schipel, Amsterdam’s airport. An elderly Indian woman had become ill during the night, so we waited quite some time for an ambulance to come and take her away. In the meantime, we checked our tickets for the next flight. Jon found that rather than a boarding pass from Amsterdam to Entebbe, he had a second boarding pass for Atlanta to Amsterdam, apparently for the empty seat next to me. So our first order of business when we finally deplaned was to get Jon a boarding pass. It took a little while, but the ticket agent saw the problem and fixed it without any trouble.

Jim and I went for breakfast, but Jon said he wasn’t hungry. I wouldn’t typically think of smoked salmon as a preferred topping for scrambled eggs, but it worked great! We bought water then joined Jon to wait an hour for the flight. “Wouldn’t it be strange to look up and see someone you knew?” said Jim

We had to clear security once again, and this time, Jim got searched. As he sat down, I looked up and saw Terri, a friend and fellow Uganda worker. She was on her way to Uganda with her husband for a quick pre-Christmas break. We talked until nearly time for the flight to board.

This is the killer flight. It is mostly during daylight hours. It crosses the Alps, the length of Italy, the Greek isles, Lybia, and the Sudan, but once again, I had a center aisle seat. This time, the other two were seated together. I had the row behind the bulkhead! And two Eastern European ladies beside me who spoke no English at all. The movies weren’t very good either.

We landed right on time. Something was definitely different at Immigration. Instead of hostility and intimidation, a man directed us to the shortest line since we already had visas. The agent there asked me what I taught and invited me to stay for at least a year!

We claimed our luggage quickly and without much effort, then breezed through customs. Joseph, Michael, and Vincent were waiting for us at the door. So was Monique, John, and Moses. And everyone was even friendly!

We hurried to the van. Joseph asked if I had read his email. I hadn’t. He said he had found another place for us that was only $45 per room rather than $170. He said it was a new place and it was very nice, so we drove out of the airport and into Entebbe. Jim commented that the roads were much better than he expected, then we turned into a narrow track with ruts deep enough to hide a cow. And it was all made worse by the amount of standing water from the evening downpour.

We drove a long way in the pitch blackness until we finally reached a gate. Our headlights fell across a sign: Andrerita Hotel. We pulled into a courtyard and went inside. Reception was okay, a room with a wooden desk. The clerk gave us three rooms and we all went upstairs with a busboy who carried at least one of the bags. The stairs were so uneven that they were hard to climb. The staircase continued to a third floor, but our rooms were all on two, so we walked down the tiled brightly lit hallway. The white ceiling had very large spots of dark mold.

I was sharing a room with Michael. There was a double bed and a single bed. He wanted me to take the large bed. We had a matching spot of mold on our ceiling, but otherwise, the partly peeling wall paper was relatively clean. We had a bathroom with a commode and a shower head aiming at a raised (as in 18 inches) platform with a drain. There was no shower curtain. The shower head was a European wand.

When I got out of the bathroom, Michael asked if we had had dinner. I told him we had. A few minutes later, he asked for money for the three of them to eat. It was only 10,000 shillings, so it wasn’t too bad.

I went on to bed. Michael came back soon. I got very little sleep due to barking dogs and very loud hotel workers!