Off to Qatar!

So today has been super incredible! We started off the day in D.C. waking up, getting our luggage all set, and having brief orientation.  Michael, our current leader, told us a lot of about the philosophy of the Go-Ed program and aspects of living within the program.  One topic he touched on that I thought was so thought provoking was the “Spiritual Leprosy” of our church today.   As he explained, Leprosy is a terrible disease that was very prevalent during Christ’s time, and it’s characterized by losing feeling in certain parts of your body and disfigurement due to that.  For example, if your arm was slammed in a car door, there would still be injury, but you would have no feeling from it.  He explained how we always talk about the church as the body of Christ, but we don’t even take into consideration the implications of such a statement.  If we are truly a body, shouldn’t we feel something when our brothers and sisters in other countries are persecuted and in danger?  We, as a body, have developed Leprosy.  When our arm in Sudan gets slammed in a car door, we feel nothing.  But the damage is still there.  We need to wake up to what’s going on and do something.  This whole notion got me so super excited for this trip.  To go and meet more of the body of Christ and learn from them and hopefully be able to teach them something is so exciting.  More to come there I’m sure!

Then we grabbed some lunch, picked up last minute belongings, waited around for a few hours, and headed to the airport.  We arrived at Dulles International Airport at about 5:45 for our 11 pm flight, so we had quite a bit of downtime.  Lots of time for good conversation and plenty of time to go through security (which we needed since some people forgot they had Swiss Army Knives in their backpacks… love you Lindsay).  We boarded our plane a little after ten, and took off right about at midnight because of slight weather delays.  The plane was fantastic.  We flew on Qatar airlines, and it was about a 12.5 hour flight.  We had supah fancy TV things in our seats, which has tons of movies, shows, games, and music, and got two meals (Chicken and pasta and stuff with chocolate mousse for dinner and Apple Pancakes and other things for breakfast- we obviously ate both meals even though we weren’t really hungry…).  I watched The Lucky One (eh.) and The Lorax (two thumbs up!) in between music and sleeping.  We landed in Qatar at about 7:30 pm here, which was 12:30 pm our time.  It's pretty sweet because I never would have thought I'd be spending any time, no matter how little, in the Middle East- but it’s so hot here.  We landed at it was already completely dark outside, but it was one of the hottest days I’ve experienced in a while.  Also, some of us had shorts on coming off the plane, which was really interesting.  We felt so immodest compared to everyone else’s dress, which is strange when I think that these are the long shorts I bought to wear at camp all summer.   Perspectives change I suppose.  We then got a delicious dinner of who knows what here at the hotel.   So right now I am in a beautiful hotel in Qatar before leaving tomorrow morning at 5 am to head to Doha International Airport for our 7:30 flight to Kigali! So far it’s been quite the adventure, especially trying to navigate through the Doha Airport… Well, that’s all for now! Here’s some teaser pictures, and I added some to the last post too:

Yay! There's our flight to Doha! (at least I think so... I thought we were
actually in A19, so this might be wrong. Butttttt, let's pretend it's right!)

At Doha International Airport! It's a little bit empty,
don't ya think?

Lindsay and my hotel room in Qatar- Crazy!

From the hotel- outside on the 6th floor by the
 pool.  Check facebook later for more of these
pictures, it was absolutely beautiful!