I wrote this blog on my flight from Atlanta, GA to Johannesburg, South Africa. These were my thoughts:
There will be times during this year that I start to write a blog – watch the cursor blink a million times – and then, maybe conjure up enough words to make complete sentences. My mind and body will be exhausted. God will have done something insane. I’ll be overwhelmed. I’ll wonder where to start. So I’ll just start typing and pray it makes sense when it arrives at your computer screen.
This is one of those times.
I learned first hand today why AIM demands that we leave our expectations behind. Over the past two days I’ve read statuses and posts from other squads mid-air on the way to their first country. My hilarious friend Shayna is on L-squad and she wrote on my Facebook wall while she was headed to Guatemala, her first country.
I suppose I never gave it much thought because in the back of my mind I knew that I would soon be boarding a plane for the 2nd longest flight in the world- Atlanta, GA to Johannesburg, South Africa. Surely on a flight such as this, we’d have a double decker aircraft where the cocktails and wifi would be free. That was mistake number one. After much pondering, asking people around me, and even my sister calling Delta to ask if we would have wifi (yes, she literally did that minutes before we took off) I asked a flight attendant, “Ma’am will there be wifi on here?” If you couldn’t already tell this was coming, her words broke my heart. “No, they haven’t quite figured out how to get wifi over that big ocean just yet. It’s coming though, it won’t be long.”
“Um? Does it LOOK like I care what is coming? I’m on THIS flight and I need wifi NOW. On THIS flight.”
Ok, I obviously didn’t say that. But it was like someone just told me my puppy died. I had e-mails to write to my family and this blog to post and I wanted to skype my boyfriend. I wanted to be able to communicate with people home during this long, gruesome 18-hour flight. DIDN’T ANYONE UNDERSTAND THAT? It wouldn’t matter if they did. The ocean is vast and there’s no wifi over it.
So I quickly text my parents, boyfriend and sister telling them I would not, in fact, be contacting them from the sky. I called my boyfriend to hear his voice one last time and he sounded fine. We hung up, I shut off my phone, and lost it. All the emotions I haven’t let out thus far came out then. The plane began to move and as I watched the Atlanta horizon shine beautifully across the sky I said out loud to my teammate, “This is not real.”
Am I really doing this? Did I really just hear my loved one’s voices for the last time in God knows when? Am I really on Delta Airlines flight 200 to end up in Zimbabwe with God knows who – God knows where – and sleeping on God knows what? And am I really gone for 11 months? With tears still in my eyes, my teammate Amy and I looked out the window again to say goodbye to American soil. “See ya in a year,” we said as we waved out the window and reality hit us both. We smiled and pinkie promised each other to have the time of our lives this year.
There’s no more talk about this. There’s no more packing, no more buying gear, no more sorting through stuff. This is real and this is it and there’s no turning back.
