The Journey Begins

Our journey began on Tuesday, July 21.  We met at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in the morning.  We flew to Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC.  That flight only took a couple of hours.  From there, we took a South African Airways Flight to Johannesburg, South Africa.  This flight left at 5:40 PM and took 17 1/2 hours.  We landed in Dakar, Senegal, to refuel.  However, we were not allowed to get off of the plane in Dakar.  

On July 22, we landed in Johannesburg around dinner time.  We stayed there overnight, and the next morning flew to Lilongwe, Malawi, which took a couple of hours.  You can see in the photos at Lilongwe that there is a lady scanning passengers' foreheads checking for fever as we enter the airport.  The other large airports had infrared cameras for this purpose.  As we were about to learn, many things in Malawi are much more labor intensive than the same tasks in the United States or elsewhere.

Feel free to post questions in the comments, and I will try to answer them.