Update, October 27, 2007

We left Zimba Friday morning as planned. We drove first to Victoria Falls which is only a few miles from Livingstone and the airport. We spent about an hour there, marveling at how different the falls are at this time of year (end of the dry season) compared to February and July when we've been there previously. The amount of water flowing over the falls is a very small fraction of what it was at either of the other times. Most of the 1.7 mile span of the falls was completely dry. The area directly in front of the falls where the team got thoroughly drenched in February (drowning Larry's digital camera) was almost completely dry -- only a trickle of water flowed over the falls at that point. The only area where significant amounts of water flowed over the falls was at the Zimbabwean end of the falls and that end we hadn't been able to see on the earlier trips because of the mist and spray closer to us. Amazing.

After a quick (?) lunch, we headed to the airport to catch our flight to Jo'burg, South Africa. They were able to check our luggage all the way through to Detroit, a real blessing even if 2/3 of the 30 some bags were empty. The flight into Jo'burg was a bit bumpy for a brief period since they were having actual rain, something we hadn't seen in a while. After a five hour layover, we were off to London's Heathrow -- about a 12 hour flight. We had a much shorter layover there (about 3 hours) that was quickly gobbled up by long delays trying to get through security so we could get to the terminal from which our next flight would depart. We arrived at the check-in desk with only about 3 minutes to spare. The 8-9 hour flight to Detroit was pretty uneventful, thankfully.

People we meet going to and from Africa, disproportionately, seem to be personalities on steroids -- everyone seems to be a bit extreme.

• The first couple of days in Zimba, a young woman (Tatiana) from California stopped by the mission house to use the internet there to help her with some seed research she was working on. She is an energetic, bubbly, courageous 18-19 year old Peace Corps volunteer living in a remote village by herself in a typical Zambian hut trying to show local farmers how to apply a number of alternative low tech farming practices to make their crops more productive.
• On the flight from Jo'burg to London, some of us sat next to an American father and his 8th grade son who were on their way back home from attending the dedication of a new high school in a remote Zambian village. It turned out the boy, out of a passion for trying to help the HIV orphans in Zambia, had raised $140,000 shooting free throws as a fund raiser to build the new school for a friend he'd met a couple years earlier. Another person (adult) helped to raise a similar amount. Both NBC and CBS had sent news film crews to film the dedication and will air segments in a week or two and then just before the NCAA tournament in the spring.
• Larry and Dr. Kari sat next to a physician from a university in London returning from an annual project meeting. It turned out he is an infectious disease specialist (virology) who is heading up a $96 million phase 3 clinical trial of a polymer-based topical application he'd developed to block HIV transmission. Its being tested in 16 communities all over Africa where they are recruiting over 9,000 patients to try it out for several years. Results will be available in about a year and a half. If it works, it sounds like a Nobel type of accomplishment.

Anyway, the point is, you just meet lots of people who are way out of the ordinary.

We arrived in Detroit around 12:30 but it took a couple of hours to collect all our bags, go through Customs, retrieve the vehicles we had left in long-term parking, and load up to drive home. The ride home was interrupted by an urgent stop to get coffee. The 36 hours of traveling with only what sleep you can get in an airplane seat argued for a late afternoon dose of caffeine to make sure we got the rest of the way home safely.

After meeting up with families at the church, all nine of the team members headed to their homes. Some of us arrived home to discover that our TV and internet cables were out because of storms a couple days earlier. The next morning during the church service, electrical power to the church and the surrounding neighborhoods went out for several hours. For some of us, it helped us feel as though we maybe were closer to Zimba than we had thought.