1.25

The last two days have been nonstop travel! It started out bad cuz I left the house really late (we got to the airport like an hour before the flight!) Luckily there were lots of nice people that let me skip and my dad asked for me to cut through security (or else I definitely would not have made it, it was like 10 minutes before my flight left when I first got in line!) But I made it on my flight just fine. The first stop was in Nashville for 2 hours then a 5 hour flight to LA with another stop for 8 hours. My luggage didn’t make it LA, so I waited around for the next few flights to come in to see if it got transferred, but it didn’t. Southwest was really great and said they would ship it to either my next airline or PNG for me. (They also gave me a really nice travel toiletry kit for free!). Then I left for Fiji on a 12 hour flight and still didn’t find my luggage. When I was at the baggage claim area in Fiji I heard someone say they were going to Madang, and I talked to her and found out she was going to POC with me! Well, the lady showed her around to where they unload the luggage and we found ours! Then we headed off through customs and such to get to our next flight 4 hours later to Port Moresby. We stopped for an hour in the Solomon Islands and then kept flying. Then in Port Moresby we found our luggage, went through customs again and checked into a domestic flight to Madang.

The Madang airport is not like any I’ve ever seen before. It was basically a runway with a few open air buildings for waiting. I don’t think there was electricity (maybe in one of the buildings there were, but not in the ones we went in). Instead of the luggage coming on a conveyor belt, they were brought to us! Then we me the POC director and headed off to the top of a mountain where the training camp is.

The camp is pretty big. It’s not like a campground but like a dorm kind of. There’s regular rooms with 3 beds and electricity (1 plug though) The bathrooms are a little ways off with bucket showers for hot water and regular running cold water. There are even regular flush toilets! :D (Oh the things I get excited about!) I’ll put pictures later!

I promise I’ll try to keep the updates shorter, to around 300ish words (about a paragraph)! This one is longer because it covers a lot of time!