Saturday, July 9, 2011

The Final Team has arrived

69 new team members showed up at Livingstone today and we were there to greet them.  Things went smoothly, though with a new fingerprinting system in Zambian immigration things were very slow.  Everyone's luggage arrived in the arrivals area prior to the team, and the porters, who have seen us do this before assumed we wanted it carried out to our trucks.  Unfortunately that meant that we had to wait until we got outside to verify that everyone got their luggage.

We had only two missing pieces, so we sent the luggage trucks ahead and eventually followed them to Namwianga.  The road from Livingstone to Namwianga is exceptional!  Much of it has shoulders, and much of it is striped, so it only took about 2.5 hours for the trip.

Kel Hamby and his team of workers had everyone's luggage separated  by name, and were holding up little airport-signs with names on them to help the new people find their things, and then most of the team walked to their housing.  Being able to do this in daylight (we arrived just after 5pm) was a great blessing.  We will have dinner in a few minutes, welcome our guests with a quick meeting and then allow them to get some much needed rest.