We made it!

After a thirty+ hour journey, we have arrived in Niger! Overall, the kids did very well on all three flights. 

Transiting through the Niamey airport turned out to be the most trying part of the journey. What often takes thirty minutes ended up taking almost three hours. And three hours seems like forever after thirty hours of travel with very little sleep.

Filling out ten entry forms (one each for the ministry of health, one each for customs) was harder than expected-trying to remember our French and keep all of the passport numbers, birth dates, etc. straight... while keeping the kids from wandering off down the enticing escalator. We were the last people to get our passports stamped.

At baggage claim our luggage was the only stuff left and our bins had already been loaded on to carts ... we counted and thankfully 14/15 checked bags had arrived with us in Niger. We sorted through fifteen airport luggage labels to find the one that matched the missing bag. Then, we reported the missing bag at the counter. 

We moved on to the final step where they put all of the luggage through X-ray. They pulled Luke back in to a side room to ask some questions. Turns out the donated batteries for the Galmi X-ray machine looked suspicious.  They X-rayed all 14 bags again. They opened the bins.  By this time, Winnie had had enough and she  just cried/screamed. Even candy and Octonauts on the iPad couldn’t calm her.  It was miserable. We were the last travelers in the airport. They lights were shut off. Still we waited while Luke talked to the officials. After over an hour of inspection and explaining and showing our paperwork/letters, etc. we were able to go with all of our luggage. 

We were very relieved to be greeted outside by our friend who had wait waited patiently to pick us up. We loaded into the car and took the final short drive to our quarantine house.  

We are so very grateful that the airport was renovated a few years ago to include jet-ways, enclosing the baggage claim and adding air conditioning.  If we had had to do all of that in 100 degree heat- we all would have been crying with Winnie!