Traveling can be fun and stressful all the same time. Now imagine traveling almost 35 hours with people you’ve only known for nine days! We all made it safely (including our luggage) from Bellingham, Washington to Kigali, Rwanda. We began by taking a short bus ride to Vancouver where some of us marveled at how different things seemed only an hour away from Bellingham. From Vancouver to Toronto we toasted our last taste of American food and boarded our flight to Ethiopia. For thirteen hours we slept, ate, watched movies, read books, and got up to pee hundreds of times. 

 

By the end of our flight, many of us were excited to be able to walk around the Ethiopian airport. Despite our hours of travel, many of us could not imagine that we were on a different continent, let alone that we had plenty of hours left on our journey! Fast forward and we are finally in Rwanda. We manage to get through an intense security check and finally step out of the airport only to get on another bus to our final destination! Many of us had tried sleeping on the plane, but we all knew that the jet lag would be intense. We forced ourselves to stay up late and take in the sights of our new location. Our excitement to explore and do research was palpable despite our need for sleep!