Bourge-WAHM: the life and thoughts of a working at home mama: Ordinary Hero

Travel Day 1 BNAàIAD June 29, 2013

The group met at Nashville International Airport at 3:45pm on Saturday, July 29^th. It was so great to put names and faces together after watching everyone’s fundraising accounts (and rooting them on!). Coming from Nashville we had: David and Kelly Blevins, Amanda and Clay Powers, Amy Makens, Angelina Ximenez (in from California), Madison Toholsky, Lee Ann Duncan, Anita Vallett, Ryan Vernich, Caitlin Cline, Brooke Powell and myself. I had met Anita before, but it was my first time meeting the rest of the Nashville team, which was very exciting. After the normal process of checking in and getting through security with 13 people, we boarded our flight to Dulles International Airport at 6:08, to wait at the gate for another hour to finally leave for DC. It was an uneventful flight (those are always the good kind) and we landed in DC hungry and ready to meet the rest of our team. This was the fun part. We had 13 people with 2 carry-ons and two 50lb bags full of donations a piece. I was probably more stressed out about the baggage and logistics than the trip to ET itself. My severe lack of upper-body strength played a small role in this anxiety. Luckily we had some strong guys and a whole lot of laughs and made it to ground transportation to be picked up from the Embassy Suites shuttle. Let me just say that more airlines should let you check your baggage completely through. Alas, we made it to the hotel, with a generous stop by our shuttle driver at Wendy’s and met remainder of our crew minus 2.

We have: Lacey Bartosh, Michael Kraft, and Allie Scrable from North Dakota. Madeleine Emery, Deborah and Skyler Schone, Kelly and Beverly Soutas from Utah, Emily Merklinger from Maryland, and Olivia Bagetelas from West Tennessee. It is so so neat to see how far Ordinary Hero reaches just by inspiring other people to be, well, ordinary heros.

After introductions, getting all the baggage into the hotel and a bite to eat we all headed to bed. First shuttle was to leave at 7am…

Our Nashville team!!

Getting us and all of our luggage to the hotel

Travel Day 2 DCàAddis Ababa, Ethiopia June 30, 2013

This team is so reliable, team members were downstairs by 7:00am and were ready to help with the ridiculous amount of bags we had. We now have a team of 23 (each with 2 carry-ons and 2 50lb bags each). There was a lot of muscle and strategy that went into loading three different shuttles of bags and people. Apparently the Embassy Suites hits a slow period on the weekends and only has one shuttle starting at 7, and little did we know we had other patrons in front of us for the shuttle. So this process took longer than expected and we finally got to the airport and the Ethiopian Airlines counter at 8:30am for a 10:15 departure. No biggie, right? Huge shout out to Lacey for being such an awesome helper during hotel and flight check-in. I couldn’t have done it without her! Lacey took the first group to the airport and I brought up the rear on the third. I was quickly informed upon arriving at the airport that there were “tickets missing”. Wait. The tickets we have had held for months and booked for weeks, missing? Yup. For whatever reason all 13 Nashville tickets were lost. Ethiopian Airlines manager was super sweet and worked relentlessly trying to fix this for us. She finally found our tickets, but since they were not connected with the manifest we didn’t actually have seats…*sigh* prayers prayers prayers* It ended up that the flight was overbooked, and while she could find seats for 7 of us, 6 would have to stay on standby until we got to the gate. praying praying praying At this point it’s 9:25am, our flight is boarding and half of our group is still at the counter. We got on it and got to the gate in record time to find that everyone had seats. Thank You God!! I was relieved to say the very least! We also met up with Joel and Kim Barbosa to bring our une 30^th OH Ethiopia team to a whopping 25!

At last, everyone boarded and settled in for a nice 11 hour flight to the other side of the world. I have read so many blog posts, seen so many pictures, and heard so many stories about these trips, the amazing people that have been met, and the lives changed. I absolutely cannot wait to see what’s in store for us on this trip and get to experience it first hand!