When Your Plane Feels Like It Will Fall Out of the Sky ....

Sorry, no chance to publish pictures, just a brief update

We are in Senegal, West Africa, spending time here with our Andando Foundation. Left Oregon with a team that started out with a team of eight, but wound up here with only seven. As we tried to check in at the Portland Airport our son Lewis was not allowed on the plane because of “passport issues”.



So the seven of us got on the plane early, early, Friday morning -, flew to New York and then to Dakar Senegal. Lewis had to make an emergency trip to Seattle to straighten out his passport and has not arrived as of yet, today being Tuesday Nov 29th.  But we know he is making progress and on his way.


No blog post would be complete without another airline story. So we’re halfway across the Atlantic and they serve the airplane dinner. As we enjoy the fine cuisine (not), it starts to get bumpy. Then ... all of a sudden .... all of us passengers are shocked and very alarmed when the plane drops a hundred feet in half a second! Everything flies into the air, including most of the food, drinks, and a small child or two. Anything not strapped in hits the ceiling of the aircraft. Real bad feeling.



People start yelling and screaming. Many passengers have not been through this kind of radical turbulence. It is very unnerving. When you experience this rapid plummet from the sky, you begin to wonder if the wings are going to fall off the plane. I’m thinking, if this is bad, then we can turn around and head back to a nearby airport. Then I realize that we are halfway over the Atlantic, probably three hours from land. This is not comforting.



I look back up the aisle of the plane and it is an astonishing view of carnage. Plates of food in the aisle, everybody is soaking wet from all the drinks flying around, and some people are crying. Unreal. And it is still bumpy and the plane is rocking. I’ve lost my appetite.


Eventually, we stabilize and the pilot comes on the intercom to reassure us that they "had not anticipated the choppy conditions". They were apparently as surprised as the rest of us. 

With all the sophisticated equipment they have, they couldn’t see this coming? And then he says, “we are the first flight to come through here, so there were no previous reports of bumpy conditions” - what? Where are we? No one has been through here before us? Are we lost?



The rest of the flight was reasonably smooth, but no one could really relax.



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We are out in the bush, here in Keur Soce, Senegal. It’s a remote village where we are deeply involved in many development activities. Unfortunately, access to internet is not good, and it might be a few days until I am able to blog again.

We are engaged with our team in a variety of projects, with a focus on a building effort at a new facility.  We worked hard there in the heat all day, and made a lot of progress.  

Fiona was injured in a fall at one of the gardens.  She took a pretty good tumble.  But she's tough and will carry on.  

Another update report will follow in the next few days.