See all of the updates from our trip here.

At the moment I’m not exactly sure which way is up because of the way my mind and senses have been assaulted in the last few days.

On Saturday evening we left my apartment in NYC. It was 31 degrees (that’s just below zero for my readers using Celsius), a light snow was falling and we weren’t wearing jackets because we were on our way to just south of the equator.

Over the next 37 hours we had two red-eye flights, over 12 hours in layovers, visited the airports of Accra in Ghana, Nairobi in Kenya, and finally arrived in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.

Along the way we met many kind and helpful people, ate some delicious Ghanaian jollof rice, and accidently tried to enter Ghana without a visa (it is helpful if you read all the signs at immigration and customs).

Once clearing customs in Rwanda we were greeted with big hugs from our friends and hosts from the Peaceful Heart Network – Gunilla and Ulf.

After settling into the hotel, we went over the plan for the next 11 days and then met a few locals for dinner, who were so charming and warm. I will tell you more about them in the next few days, once I know them a bit better and can do their stories and lives justice. They have lived quite some lives.

Two quotes from dinner:

1) When you cheers with drink glasses, the Rwandans will often say “Kubuzima bwacu” which means “to our life” in a Swahili dialect.

2) One of our local guides was telling us the story of his life and healing, which was a breathtaking story of suffering and overcoming struggle. At the end of it he said (with a smile as wide as his face because he is on the other side of healing), “I was professionally traumatized”!

After dinner I climbed into a bed for the first time in almost three days…such sweet rest!

Tomorrow we are off to a school for 6 to 12-year-olds to see how tapping has been introduced as part of their schooling.