We Made It!

June 25, 2006

After spending an unexpected night in a hotel on Thursday night, we headed back to the Chicago airport. Lufthansa helped us ensure that we would have seats on our Frankfurt flight when we arrived in New York. United promised us that all of our checked luggage (24 pieces in all) would be at La Guardia when we arrived there. We finally boarded our flight for New York, happy to be back on our journey once again.

Upon our arrival at La Guardia airport in New York, we rushed to baggage claim to pick up our luggage, which we would then have to transport to JFK where we would fly to Frankfurt. But our luggage was not there! We waited for one more flight from Chicago – still no luggage. We didn’t have time to wait any longer, so called a shuttle and made our way to JFK, about a 30 minute drive in New York rush hour traffic.

We got to JFK exactly two hours before our scheduled departure time, ran in to get into the long line at Lufthansa. A lady who worked for Lufthansa saw the baby and sent us to another very short line to help us get through more quickly. I asked her if the rest of the team who was traveling along with us could come as well, she said yes. It’s nice to get a break after having so many setbacks. But when we got to the counter, the girl behind the desk sitting next to ours starting having a fit that we were all ‘cutting in line.’ I tried to explain what was going, but she was very persistent: “Only the family!” So we complied. And eventually talked the girl that was helping us into checking the others in as well. (I had to go and retrieve their passports, as I wasn’t about to bring them back to the counter, but she checked them in anyway!)

We made our flight...the kids did really well. Kelsey went to sleep after about the first hour, and slept the whole fight, about 5 hours. Then we had exactly 45 minutes to find our gate and board our plane to Addis Ababa. We ran through the airport, making only one wrong turn. We did make the flight with about 25 minutes to spare (thank you Lord!) After another uneventful flight (another 5 hours, with a stop in Karthoum, Sudan) and we finally arrived in Ethiopia. We had been traveling for about 57 hours. It should have taken about 24.

Our luggage was not at the Ethiopia airport either. We filed claims, and they gave us 850 Birr (about $100) per ticketed passenger who had misplaced luggage. They wanted us to be able to buy incidentals. This was an unexpected but very welcome blessing. We had carried one extra set of basic clothing, but were not prepared to live without our suitcases for more than about a day! And at this point we had no idea if or when we would ever see our luggage again.

We ended up going to bed around 1:00 am local time. We slept so well, as you can imagine. The next morning I got up around 9:00 am. The rest of the team had gone to breakfast at 7:30 (the guest house where we are staying serves three meals a day) and on to church at 9:30. So around 11:00 I woke the rest of the family so we could go to lunch with the team. We walked with Steve Strauss, our team leader, to get a taxi, and rode to a local hotel where we had lunch. The food was great, and the coffee was amazing! After lunch, we came back to the Guest house and just relaxed, napped, and got to know some other missionaries. I did venture out with Steve’s help again, and purchased some food and other necessities from little store fronts.
Things here are going really well. Thank you for your prayers. We just got word that we might actually see our luggage tomorrow night! The word is that they found it all in Chicago...The amazing thing here is that the only travel difficulties we had were all American problems. We have had no problems internationally, at least not yet!