Thornhills in Ghana - Letter 1

Dear Family and friends,

You are the lucky people that we happen to have the e-mail address for--therfore, you get our news and we ask that you pass it on to other family and friends. We got up at 4am on Sat. Jan.10 and were at Dunkin Donut by 4:30. We drove our rent a car to Kennedy Airport and were in line by 7:30--a very long line already. Our flight scheduled for 11:55 had been delayed until 2pm. They opened the line a little after 7:30 and we got processed about 9:30 with still a large line behind us. The flight has been delayed until 3pm. We did get some breakfast at McDonald's and went to our gate in the A section and had a bit of a nap. About 11:30 we looked at the screen for the flight and found that the plane was now taking off in the B section so we had to go out of the secure area and go through security a second time. We got to the B section and found that the plane had not yet arrived from Ghana. It arrived about 2pm. They then had to unload, restock, and repack the plane. About 5pm we boarded the plane. We were put in the middle section with no space for our bags overhead. We found that we could put our bags on the seats in the last two rows so took them back and found empty seats including two on the side that only had two in the row so we moved to the back.

The flight was very good and the food was good also. We arrived in Accra about 8am (instead of 3am as scheduled). They unloaded from the rear of the plane so we were among the first off and through customs. We waited for our bags, and waited, and waited, and waited, until we were told they were finished. We did not get any of our four checked bags! We then had to get in another line of about 50 people to report lost luggage. We came out of the airport about 11am.

We were met by Eric Arthur (from Ghana and the man that placed us in the school for Global Volunter Network) and his assistant Evelyn. Eric is in charge of the Helping Hands School Project. They drove us through the city to Eric's home where we had lunch and took a nap. About 3:30 they took us on a mini-tour of Accra. We also changed some money and bought a few things like towels and another shirt until our baggage arrives (maybe Thursday). We did walk around for about two hours as Eric took care of some business. We did find some good ice cream while we were doing that. The city is very poor. However, there are lots of taxis and other types of busses to get around.

We got home again about 8:00 and started to get ready for bed. We lost electric power and it still had not come back on by morning. We moved to another home today because we have to wait in Accra for our bags. We are with a woman whose husband was a diplomat so the home is quite nice and she is also. We hope to be moving up-county by Thursday afternoon or Friday if our luggage arrives. We have not had any luck getting our E-mail from Harry(at)thornhills.com. I just set up this Hotmail account. Please use this address in the future. HarryThornhill@hotmail.com. We hope that this one will work. If you sent anything to the other address in the last few days we did not get it. This may be better as we won't have all the junk mail knowing this address. We will try to access both accounts in the future but will most likely depend on this hotmail account. Put both in as addresses and we will see what happens.

Joan watched our landlady (Comfort) cook today and had a good time. I took another nap. The heat is going to take a bit getting used to since we left home in below 0 weather. It is now about 4:30 on Monday afternoon. We are 5 hours ahead of you. We did call Ross this morning to let him know that we arrived safely. We will be in touch again sometime.

Love, Joan and Harry