And Lia's Off to Africa!

After learning about HXP years ago when my brother sent his two oldest children to Ecuador for a church humanitarian trip, I thought how amazing it would be if I could provide the same opportunity with my own children when they grew older.  Although this experience had it in the back of my mind for several years, I realized at the beginning of this school year that this coming summer would be the best summer of Lia's teenage years to go for a few different reasons.  Since Lia always is more comfortable doing adventurous things with a friend at her side, I immediately reached out to my dear friend, Kerry, to see if she would be interested in having her daughter, Lacey, go with Lia.  Since Lacey and Lia have been pen pals since the summer of 2015, they have met in person three times and have become very close friends who are basically in daily contact now with each other.  In addition, since Kerry loves travelling as much as I do and has always prioritized it for her family, I was very hopeful that she would be willing to let Lacey go on this great, big adventure with Lia.  

Much to my relief, Kerry and her husband said "yes" after Lacey decided that she would like to go with Lia.  After a stressful week of registration at the end of November, we learned that our girls had been assigned to the same trip to Mozambique in Africa after submitting a list of Top 20 trips.  Needless to say, we were all absolutely thrilled about this little miracle and began the seven month wait until the day arrived!

After much preparation and a lot of shopping and packing, I drove Lia to the airport bright and early Tuesday morning for her to catch a flight from Seattle to Dulles in Washington DC where Kerry and Lacey would be picking her up.  We were both a little nervous about her flying across the country alone for the first time and having to navigate baggage claim and meeting up with Kerry on her own.  Luckily, she had a smooth flight across the country and managed to find baggage claim after taking a train in the airport all on her own.  Her suitcase arrived safely and Lia only had to wait a few minutes before the girls arrived to pick her up.  Lia then spent a little over 15 hours on the East Coast before catching her flight out of JFK to Africa.  Kerry and I both marveled at the fact that they drove through 5 states (Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York) and the District of Columbia during this little window of time, especially since Lia was sleeping for about half of that time at Kerry's house.

After arriving at Kerry's home in Maryland and spending the night on Tuesday's night, they left at 5:30 yesterday morning to make the 3.5 hour drive to JFK from their home.  Since Kerry's husband, Dave, offered to take the day off work to help drive the girls to NYC, he was able to wait in the car outside the airport while Kerry took the girls into the terminal to meet up with their HXP group for the very first time.  Since it was a little tricky to find their group in such a large airport, I was so grateful that Kerry was there to help them as finding this group alone would have been pretty stressful for the girls.  After successfully finding the group, Kerry quickly said a goodbye to the girls before leaving them to go on the biggest trip so far in their life!  I am so grateful that Kerry was there to help Lia get to the right place at the right time.  It was such a relief to know that she had successfully met up with her group and that she would now be under the care of two college leaders and two parent leaders for the next 2.5 weeks!  Good luck, Lia!  I hope you can go and have the adventure of a lifetime!

Lia saying goodbye to me before boarding her plane in Seattle.

Lacey meeting Lia outside the Dulles airport with a darling, welcome sign.

The girls eating breakfast in the car after leaving Lacey's house at 5:30 yesterday morning to make the drive to JFK.

After figuring out just two days in advance that Lia and her cousin, Riley, were going to be on the same flight from JFK to Kenya, Lia ran into his group going to Zimbabwe right after walking into Terminal 4 with Lacey and Kerry when they first arrived at JFK.  I was grateful that Kerry took this darling picture of these two cousins who have literally grown up together!

A final picture of Lia and Lacey before saying goodbye to Kerry.

Since the girls had to hand their phones over to the leaders at the JFK airport to begin a 2.5 week "digital detox," we are now relying on the parent leaders to post daily pictures and video on Instagram to keep us updated on everything that they are doing in Africa.  Here is one of the airport pictures that was posted of Lia and Lacey and two other girls after meeting up with the group.

Thanks to an airline app that Kerry sent me, I was able to follow 12 out of 13 hours of Lia's flight from JFK to Nairobi.  It was pretty surreal to watch her plane fly across the Atlantic Ocean and then most of Africa all day long yesterday.  When I went to bed, she still had an hour left of her flight.  After landing in Nairobi, her group then had to change planes and then take a 4-hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa.  When I woke up today, she was was in Johannesburg.  Lia is then going to spend one day going on a safari and a river rafting adventure before taking the bus to Mozambique tomorrow where she will then spend the next two weeks helping to build two classrooms on a preexisting school.  It should be an amazing experience and I hope that she grows and learns so much during this time away from home!