Ray's report to family II

Six days before I was to fly to London to meet Donna, I fell off my bike and broke my left 6th rib. I made sure that I didn't puncture a lung, but still it made travel difficult, particularly when I sneezed or coughed.

With all these negative omens, I boarded a Virgin Atlantic overnight flight to London. I had a tough time sleeping on the flight because of the broken rib. I met Donna in the British Airways terminal in London. We could not help reminiscing about our trip two years ago, where Kyle, Daniel, and the two of us had spent a day waiting in the same terminal for our flight to Dar es Salaam. That was literally, a lifetime ago.

When we arrived in Dar some things had changed. There was a new electronic passport reader and an automatic fingerprint reader at the entrance = but the fingerprints did not all register. We went to the Colosseum hotel, a relatively nice hotel, and it has a great gym associated with it! After a nap, Andrea and her daughter met us at the hotel and gave us a phone and explained the details of our trip. A familiar face was appreciated at this point! We went to dinner that night with Myra's friend, Maggie, who lives in Dar. She had heard about Joe from multiple sources. She was in the second co-ed class at Amherst, she had been in Myra's class at Yale, and she was active in the NGO community of Dar. It turns out that she had grown up in Larchmont! We talked about many things, but in particular she let us talk extensively about Joseph, which was very, very helpful for us.