Matt and Becki Dillingham

Salama! from Madagascar

At the beginning of September we returned to the UK to finalise our packing and say goodbye to friends, family and England! We took the opportunity to take Bethan to a few tourist attractions with steam trains as she won't see one for a while. Our good friend Ruth came down for our last few days to help out with what turned out to be quite a frantic time getting everything ready. As always Ruth appears at times of stress (when we've left too much to the last minute) and saves the day!

We took a taxi to the Premier Inn at Heathrow on Monday and spent the evening doing some last minute rearranging of our hand luggage (Becki) and watching England beat Switzerland (Matt). By 5am we were aboard the shuttle bus to Heathrow, with a bus driver who couldn't quite believe how many cases he had to load/unload. 

All our luggage which amazingly made it to Antananarivo 

We were pleased to get a very helpful check-in lady who decided to ignore the fact some of our bags were overweight and was very helpful. The rest of our journey through Heathrow was not so easy, with numerous staff stopping us to tell us we could not take all our hand-luggage to the plane and then deciding there was not enough time and we should go through after all. It was a bit of a mad dash to the plane and we were the last ones to board but they didn't mind that we were carrying our bodyweight in hand luggage!

At Paris things were a lot smoother as we had 3 hours to get across the terminal. In the departure lounge we met Karina and her daughter, Faith, who are our new MAF colleagues. Everything went smoothly until we reached row 17 (again fully laden with hand luggage) on-board the plane. It was here that Bethan decided it was time for a nap RIGHT NOW and she was going no further! Our seats were in row 52 so this was not so helpful and meant Becki had to go to the seats to dump the stuff, then come back for Bethan who was holding up all the other passengers. Bethan slept through take-off and we both managed to watch a film in peace. It was a good flight and we passed the 10 hours with stories, playdough, colouring and a supply of snacks. Bethan travelled really well too! Bethan fell asleep again for landing so we tied her up in a sling still asleep, meaning she got a bit more sleep and we got to jump the line thanks to our ''sleeping baby'' – being small for her age comes in handy sometimes!

Goodbye Europe

Hello Africa

And so we arrived at Ivato International Airport, Antananarivo. Despite this flight being a weekly occurance, it seemed as though a plane full of people had caught them by surprise. The queues were long and painfully slow moving as people invited their friends to jump the queue and join them in getting their visa's stamped. Luggage successfully collected, we then gained an entourage of ''helpers'' who were going to push our trolleys whether we liked it or not. Once we had convinced them we really did not have anything to declare we met Bert, the program manager for MAF Madagascar who firmly dealt with the demands for money from our ever increasing number of helpers.

We were very pleased at 1.30am when we were in our new home, with all our luggage and able to go to sleep! We also felt very blessed the next morning when we unpacked and put cards up from people back home reminding us of how much support we have from England.