Thoughts from Nicaragua: Day I

First, a confession. I never journaled the following in Nicaragua. The following will be my recollection of the very long day of travel. It's only purpose is to fill the void of information that used to exist.

So we had an early start this morning. We met in front of the Ministry House at 3:45 AM, packed the vans and left for the airport. We did the normal airport stuff... after meeting Shannon there, we checked our bags, proceeded to security and waited for our flight to board. We had McDonalds breakfast. Arriving at Houston, we then proceeded to wait for our next leg... for some ungodly six hours or so. During that time, we sat and slept and ate lunch together at the food court (most of us Panda Express), wondered about, sat in the Brookstone Massage chair... a tangent on the chair if I may...

I entered this trip with much anxiety about my future, a lot of built up tension... the flight to Houston, I was the most uncomfortable I've ever been on a flight. My seat did nothing for me, and I attribute the discomfort to my stress... anyways, the massage chair felt amazing to sit in, but like how Psychotherapy has the potential to unlock repressed emotions, causing an avalanche of memories and pain and tears, the chair had the same effect on my physical state... it simply awoke all the pain from the tension I'd carried for those many months of future anxiety.

Back to the story... I sat in the chair and only became more sore. At one point we played a card game, but for the most part we slept (some didn't go to sleep the night before). Oh, Gabby and Heidi were the lucky ones of our group. They had to catch different flights to Houston than we took. So there flights didn't arrive till after we had lunch, a few hours shorter a lay-over.
Eventually we boarded and took off for Nicaragua. We caught the Sunset on our flight and landed in darkness in Managua... Ironically, most of us caught the sunset on the flight over. Landing in Nicaragua, we then waited a long time at Customs, paid our fee for entering, I got my first foreign country stamp in my Passport, and left the Airport where we were greeted by Pastor Pablo, Isaac (Eee-sock), and others from the church. We then drove to the church and homes, sat around a bit, found our living arrangements, and went to bed, sleeping in the next morning. Our time with the Nicas had arrived, but I think we were all too tired to fully grasp and express the excitement we had.