"You must really like to fly"  was the comment of the  flight attendant from Scotland on our British Air flight from Heathrow to Johannesburg.  What prompted the statement was my comment that I would have the curried chicken because "that was good last night." -- We'll return to the concept of good airplane food later.   Its Monday.  We left Chicago on Saturday. Two overnight flights in a row with a nine hour layover in London.  I feel like I've been in the airport forever.  Now we are waiting out our final layover in Johannesburg for the final leg of our flight to Windhoek.  We are in Africa, but it doesn't really seem like it yet.  We've got to get out of the airport and into the real world.  The Empowering Learners trip is well underway.

Because we had such a long london layover we did leave the airport and take the tube into London.  We walked around the London School of Economics with Josh Martin, and then meandered through the South Bank area having lunch at Giraffe.  Yesterday was a hard day, the overnight flight with the 6 timezone change really messes you up.  This morning was easier as we flew mostly north to south, crossing only one time zone.  We are really thankful to the gate agent in Chicago who rearranged our seats on this flight so that we had the aisle seats in the middle section with nobody in between us.  We were able to stretch out and get some decent rest last night.

About this trip.  This is not just a trip for fun, this is partly a mission trip and partly a cultural experience.  The trip is organized by Empowering Learners, a non profit organized by Ethan Schultz, and Ann Sponberg-Peterson.  The goal is to bring 24 laptop computers and 50 calculators to the Oshigambo high school in Northern Namibia.  We also carried along an assortment of Braille books, and Soccer balls to distribute along the way.  There are a total of 12 of us on the trip and we got all of this stuff along with us in carry on and checked baggage, we are definitely going to be a lot lighter on the drive home than we on the trip here.  Once we complete our business working with the high school we'll be visiting the Etosha Game Park and the Atlantic Coast in Swakopmund.  More detail to follow.

For now we are safely checked in at the Safari Court Hotel.  After two nights sleeping on airplanes and having our morning coffee in airports, we are all ready for a shower!   As a group we will have a little break before meeting with our tour guide for the trip and then heading to downtown Windhoek for a meal at a nice German restaurant.