Day 1, Our Travel Day

Tonight we are blogging in the womens' dorm. While we are using Jenni's blogger account...we are all putting our thoughts here.

Pat Daniels' remarks at what a long travel day we had. We arrived at Watkinson at 7 am and left for JFK at 7:30. Arrived at JFK at 9:30 and after a seamless check in, boarded our flight at 11:10. And yes, JetBlue waived our fees for the extra bags we had! At 11:40, we were wheels up and airborn. Hayden French was the most excited as he'd never ridden in a plane before. Our flight was uneventful, and we landed in Santo Domingo at 4:10 and quickly turned on cell phones to find out the result of the soccer game that kept four members of our group home until Monday. (They won 4-3 in a very intense battle and will play again tomorrow in the championship game!)

We made it through customs with all of the meds donated by friends and family from Watkinson without a hitch. The big yellow school bus from the Good Samaritan Hospital was waiting for us, and we met our host for the week, Emilio. (He is shown in the second photo above, included because he stood in the stairwell of the bus for the 75 minute ride to La Romana and please notice that the bus only has one door.)

Our hosts at the dorms, called Casa Pastoral, had dinner waiting for us. After dinner we talked about our plans for tomorrow and then spent about an hour packing food kits to be distributed at Batey 50 on Monday. Both Pat Daniels and Michele Kadis remarked on how well our team worked together. Everyone found a job, a massive assembly line formed, and we had 130 food kits packed in what felt like the blink of an eye.