2/12/2010 – Mt. Kilimanjaro Journal
LyttleBryan March 19th, 2010
This is part of a series of posts from my Mt. Kilimanjaro journal. The contents may, or may not, have been affected by serious altitude delusion. I’ll leave that for the reader to decide…
2/12/2010
I’ve now been either in an airport or on a plane for 26 hours. It’s not been as bad as I would have expected, honestly. I slept for 5 of the 8 hours of the transatlantic flight from Detroit, MI to Amsterdam, NE. The Amsterdam airport isn’t that remarkable an airport really. Though they do have good coffee. It was here while waiting for the connection to Kilimanjaro International Airport that we met a fellow American by the name of Jack Stagge. Jack is a missionary from Washington state who runs the faces4hope mission. I spoke with him for quite a while about the things he does. His primary goal, that I could gather at least, is increasing the social placement of women in the rural parks of Tanzania. Their social status is below cattle and only slightly above children.
Some of the more traditional missionary things they do include education, health, general life improvement and of course spreading Christianity. I was impressed with the amount of stuff his mission has accomplished, and it was an excellent start to my trip. It was also an excellent start to the information gathering tasks my girlfriend, Julie, had assigned to me on behalf of her Public Health class. Anything in the name of education, right?
I’ll pause there and complain that I’m sitting on a plane at the gate an hour after we were supposed to leave. The captain is on the intercom informing us the gate switch was caused by another planes flat tire blocking our original gate. At the end of the speech though, I just can’t help but smile because he gave the speech in 3 different languages! I love international travel. For the first time on thi8s trip I really feel like I’m on vacation. Maybe it’s because this flight takes me over the snow covered peak of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
- Backpacking , Hiking
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