Day 1 June 6th and 7th

Well like I promised over a month ago...here is the start of my trip.

Around 12pm on the 6th of June we all met for the first time in NYC. It was kinda nerve racking, but everyone was so nice. We hung out in NYC till 8 pm when our plane took off. We had just enough time to ride the free ferry from Statin Island to Manhatten, grab some nasty McDonalds as our last meal in America. The team included Jim Copeland who was our team leader, Emily who is a pre-med major at Grove City, Mindy who is an ICU nurse in Alabama, Kait who is a senoir nursing major at Marshal University and Sarah who had just finished Nursing school at Roberts Wesleyan. The flight took about 6 and 1/2 hours and the first hour and 1/2 was really bad turbulance. It was horrible and I felt like I was going to throw up and pass out. They wouldn't let anyone out of their seats. It was pretty bad. We flew over night which was nice considering we were tired and could sleep a little. We arrived in Cassablanca around 8 in the morning their time. They are 5 hours ahead of our time and we lost 6 hours on the plane. We didn't fly out again to Bamako until midnight so we took a train into the city. We crammed into a taxi and got a quick tour of the city and then met up with a school teacher over there. We went to the 3rd largest Mosque in the world and got a tour. It was absolutly beautiful and a shame that some other god was worshiped there. Here is a picture of our team in front of the Mosque.

Left to right is Kait, Jim, Mindy, Sarah, Me, Emily

We were then able to go back to the teacher's school compound where she lived. She is a missionary from here, but because Morocco is a closed country it cannot be known that she is a missionary. It was such a blessing that we were able to go to her place and sleep a bit, we were all so worn out. She took us to a cute little hole in the wall cafe for lunch and for dinner we went to a more formal resturant.

This is a picture of us having this delicious mint tea at the resturant!

We then headed for the airport for our next 3 hour flight to Bamako, Mali where we would meet up with the Grudda's and head to Cote d' Ivoire