typhoid for breakfast

It's official. Our trip to Ethiopia has stretched from 10 days to 3 weeks. This is great news! We'll get to spend time with Marta and Deme, who we have met before, and dearly love! We would have missed them if we'd waited and gone with the group as originally planned. It would just be wrong not to see them, and they asked for us specifically to come early, which is hugely flattering and a great honor. They want us, they got us. So now we'll go to Denver on November 7th for the First Pick Party, and fly from the Denver airport on the 8th. We land in Addis Ababa, and will be picked up by someone from Project Mercy and taken to the compound - about 60 miles and a two to three hour drive away. Is this crazy or what? Two years ago there was no way in the world I ever wanted to go to Africa. Things change...

We're getting serious now about planning and packing. I hope I can find internet near the compound someplace, so I can keep the blog rolling while we're there. I'm checking into that. Also looking into phone plans that will keep us connected to the folks back home, and wondering just what sort of electrical adapters we'll need for all our technology. We might decide to just leave it all at home if it looks like it will be too distracting. We have jobs to do over there. This is no vacation.

We're also continuing with all the vaccinations... man, there's a lot of stuff, and it's all expensive. We're over $700 into it now, and we're not done yet. I'm normally a "take your vitamins" kind of girl, and this much medical stuff is really creeping me out. This morning we started our course of typhoid vaccine. It has to be taken an hour before food, with cold water, every other day for four doses. I got up this morning and started making tea and toast, when Rick dashed into the kitchen and said, Don't eat! Oh yeah... I forgot it was the morning for Typhoid Treats.

I felt a little weird for a while, but maybe that was just hunger and lack of caffeine. It's been about 3 hours now, and I feel OK, so I guess I'll go make some beads. Once we get done with the typhoid, we move on to the polio booster! Weeeeee!