Sunday June 9, 2024 Home at last!

June 9, 2024

My flight from London to Austin started out nearly an hour late but the estimated arrival now is around 4:30pm, only half an hour behind.  I suppose it depends a lot on how the jetstream cooperates. My 6 hour planned layover allowed me to have a big breakfast in a sit down restaurant at Heathrow after I cleared security. The delayed flight meant I bought an egg sandwich before boarding.  One thing about Heathrow.  Their security is tight. They don’t announce your departure gate until you only have a few minutes to get there. So, you need to stay on your toes and keep an eye on the screens or have an app on your phone for the airline you are using. The app beat the screens by a couple of minutes. 

I’m waiting for the early part of the the flight meal, then I’ll sleep for a while. I’ll decide whether purchasing onboard wifi  is worth it for the second half of the flight or not. The meal was a chicken stew that was really pretty good, with some kind of cheesy potatoes,  veggies, a roll and a fudge brownie cup, plus cheddar cheese and crackers. It filled me up and I slept a little over an hour, waking up around 10am Austin time. If I get wifi, it will only be for 4 hours for about $6.50 (after converting from English pounds). A full flight is about $15.

I texted Pastor Michael early this morning from Heathrow before our prayer group blessed the sanctuary and all who would come to worship at Redeemer.  He was happy I was going to get back without incident.

As I write this, I have traveled about 1600 miles from London and we are nearing the southern tip of Greenland, with about 3300 miles remaining. 

I’m still a little too close to the clinic we conducted at Dandora to reflect on it much. We served 2255 people by my count, but with all the mayhem the final 3 mornings I can hardly say I’m as confident in that number compared to past vision camps. For one thing, I has a statistician from Nairobi County recording information from the cards until after each day. I typically keep up with categorizing them for our purposes and count numerous times during the day. Also, we kept some cards aside to supply reading or distance glasses to the patients later, after we’re gone and that number grew each day as our inventory dwindled.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the real number we served isn’t closer to 2500. God knows!

I’m now less than an hour and a half from Austin. Woohoo! It will be good to sleep in my own bed laying down instead of sitting up in a plane or airport. I’ll be editing lots of pictures soon, so stay tuned here or on my Facebook as I start to publish them. Only about 2000 this time, usually 5-6000. I’m hoping for at least 200 keepers. Blessings everybody and thanks for following along thus far! Check back, more to follow soon!