Tomorrow Genevieve and I take flight!  It’s going to take about 24 hours to get to Liberia. We leave my house at 1:30pm for JFK and depart at 6:15pm. We land in Brussels, Belgium at 7:45am, and then have a 4-hour layover. We have a stop on the Ivory Coast (the country to the east of Liberia) and then fly into the airport in Monrovia, where MacDella will pick us up.

As soon as we arrive, MacDella is taking us to the US Embassy to check in and then we’ll settle in and meet everyone. I’ll try to get a blog post up on the 22nd.

I’m honestly not nervous at all. I think that’s because A) I have a travel buddy, B) I trust MacDella so much, and C) I did a ton of research on Liberia last semester, for two classes, so I have realistic expectations and I’ve mentally prepared myself for the poverty and devastation we’ll see…though I can’t expect how it will feel to see it. It was only a few years ago that Liberia was in the middle of civil war. I’ll do my best to capture both the struggles and the smiles.