April 15, 2008

• He made it home!

  After a couple of days of anxiety on my part, mostly fueled by and the fault of a very hyper active imagination we finally picked John up from the airport! He has spent the last four weeks in Malawi, South Africa.

  He looks to be 10 or more lbs lighter than he was when he left and about four shades darker in coloring. That African sun sure does give a fantastic tan! Overall he looks great. Suspect jet lag will hit him like a ton of bricks tomorrow but tonight he is up sharing some of his pictures and stories.

  We are so thankful he made it back safe and sound. Our (Mostly mine, Steve pretty much makes it a policy not to worry about things until he needs to) concern was caused by the fact that we showed up at the airport on the appointed day for him to return with our copy of his flight itinerary. After watching the entire flight he was supposedly on disembark and pick up their luggage with no sign of John I went to the United Counter and proceeded to beg information. Strictly according to the law they were not allowed to get me any information but after spinning my tale of worry for little brother out of the country for the first time, sick with Malaria, no means of contacting us due to a dead cell phone etc they finally broke down and decided to help. After almost three hours we were told that he was either
  A) In quarantine (interesting side note with that, if you are quarantined coming into the US you are not even allowed one phone call!) or
  B) Still stuck in Africa or
  C) In Dulles airport in DC. They paged him every half hour at Dulles with no response.

  With visions of John lost in deepest darkest Africa flitting through my mind we reluctantly headed back home to resume the search the next day and praying he would contact us. As it turns out they did not get him to the Airport on time to make his scheduled flight out of Malawi so he ended up flying to Zimbabwe instead of Ethiopia where they informed him that they had no record of his flight. So he hung out there for a day or so until they could get him worked onto a flight. He couldn’t call us because guess what? Cingular doesn’t have service Zimbabwe in case anyone was wondering.

  Anyway. We are super happy having him back safe! Hoping to arrange a get together for people to come and hear how his trip went from da man himself.

  • 2:40 am
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