A Few Twisted Turns of Events

Several have ask that I tell the rest of the story regarding our return trip home!  So here goes the last post for this trip.

Houston, TX is a large international airport, with many people from Southern Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America entering the United States in Houston.  When we got off our plane and entered Immigration, it looked like there might be 1000 to 1500 in line to be processed.  It was Easter Sunday, and there were very few Immigration Officers working at the windows.

The last time I went through Immigration, one of the workers told my wife and I that soon, Immigration would be done at self-service kiosks and would be much faster.  Here in Houston, there were approximately 30 of these machines set up for beta testing.  You had to use the new machine, but you also needed to see an Immigration Officer.  The four students who were on the trip without an accompanying parent were going through immigration with me.  I had paper work that said I was their guardian.

Parker walked up to the new machine. It scanned his passport, took his photograph, and spit out a receipt with pertinent information and his photograph.  He moved into the incredibly long line to see the Immigration Officer.  Kara and Jake each stepped up to a machine, and both had problems.  Kara's machine refused to scan her passport.  While she was repeating the process several times, Jake was having troubles with the machine he was using as well.  After several attempts to get the machine to take him through the process, Jakes machine finally froze on a particular screen and refused to budge.

Everyone is new at using these machines.  There is a person at the entrance to the kiosks who is a little frustrated at citizens who don't seem to know how to read, or to follow directions.  So when I told her that Jakes machine had frozen up, I got the look of "I have to deal with another moron" . . . which may have been true!  But, she finally sucummed to my motion for help, and discovered that I was not a moron and the machine had quit working.  She told Jake to find a new machine while she rebooted the stubborn kiosk.  Meanwhile, Kara found a machine that would scan her passport and she got her receipt.  She stayed with the group.  Jake is still having trouble, and Tyler is also having trouble with the machines.  Afer what seemed like an eternity, Jake and Tylers receipts finally printed out, and they looked just like Kara's and mine, with the exception that their receipts had a big black X through their photos!!  We would soon find out that there was significance to the black X.

As the four of us departed the kiosk area, we had to show our receipts to a line monitor.  Jake and Tyler were told to hang a left from the monitors position, which was consistent with all people who had a black X through their photo on the receipt.  It was clear that the black X indicated you were a problem child and needed special attention!  I didn't want to be separated as a group, but decided to go where they told Kara and I to go . . . . to the "Good Guys" line, and then wait for Tyler and Jake to get through the line.

The crowd was so large that when Kara and I got through immigration, I couldn't see Jake and Tyler.  After looking around for a little while, I decided they must have gone downstairs to get their luggage to go through customs. So, we headed down to baggage claim and found our bags, but no Jake and Tyler.  A phone call to Jake revealed that he and Tyler were still standing in line and they had a long way to go before they would reach the Immigration Officer.

By this time, people from our group were calling us from their seat on the plane!!  They first indicated that the plane door would close in 11 minutes.  Tyler and Jake were still in immigration.  But soon, Jake called and said he and Tyler had made it through immigration and were heading down to find their bags.  The customs line was 10 or 15 minutes.  Tyler and Jake were in line.  Kara and I were looking for them to get through Customs.  We still could't see them yet.  We got a call from the plane that the door closed in 4 minutes.  After about five minutes, Jake and Tyler were coming through customs!  They dropped their bags off at baggage security and started to run upstairs to the plane gate.  There were so many people on the escalator that they ran up the steps.  I remember saying out loud .  . . I can't take the steps.  But I did take the steps, trying to keep up with students 45 years my junior.  But at the top of the stairs, around the corner, was another security line, and it was not short.  The phone was quiet.  No calls from the plane.  After we got out of security, I told the kids to run as fast as they could to the gate.  I knew if they got on, they would wait for me!

Everyone took off running.  Most of us were carrying our shoes as there was no time to put them on.  The gate was so close that the kids ran past it!  As they turned around, the empty seats in the gate area and the empty ticket agent podium told the whole story.  The plane was gone.

Jake shared with us that it was on his bucket list to run through an airport and just barely catch his flight.  Well, we didn't catch the flight, but it was close enough for Jake to cross it off his list!!

Our next stop was the United Customer Care Center.  There we got to see the ugly parts of humanity, as witnessed one woman chastise her husband for being so stupid as to book a flight with so little time to make it through immigration.  I think he was taking the right approach by saying very few words!  Another lady was giving the ticked agent the business because there was not another flight until morning.  Seeing that those two approaches yielded nothing that seemed positive, we decided to take the "lets just see what the next best move we can make will be" attitude.  While that attitude was a whole lot better on us and the ticked agents, it didn't really produce any different results!

The agent told us there was a flight leaving in an hour to San Francisco, but it was completely booked.  He told us that he could almost guarantee us that we would not get on that flight, but we told him to put us on standby anyway, as we had nothing to loose.

When we got to the gate, it was apparent that we were the 10th through the 13th standby passengers waiting for a seat, and a woman and her two daughters showed up after us!!  16 people waiting for a standby seat on a sold out plane!

The kids were hungry.  It was about 9:45 in the evening, and they hadn't purchased much of a lunch in the Montego Bay airport!  They wanted to just forget the standby flight and get something to eat, but I told them we needed to play this option out before we went to eat.

As the plane filled, much to my surprise, they started calling some standby passengers!  There were seats on the plane!  And before they were through, they gave each of us sixteen standby passengers a boarding pass!  We all headed down the jetway and on to the plane.  I went to find my seat when I discovered another person sitting in my seat.  I knew we were in trouble when that person produced a boarding pass with the same seat number as I had!  Kara, Tyler, and Jake were having the same problem!  So, the attendant told us to wait at the rear of the plane.  After five minutes of shuffling passengers, it was clear that there were more passengers on the plane than there were seats!  Soon, we could see the mom and the two girls being asked to get back off the plane!  Then the counting began.  First one attendant, then another.  One of them came back and told me that there were only three open seats on the plane.  He wasn't sure what to do.  I told him that the solution was obvious.  We had to fly together and we needed four seats.  They didn't have four seats.  The only logical thing to do was to kick us off the plane and seat the mom and the two daughters back on the plane.  The attendants were relieved that there was not a yelling incident.  The mom and daughters were delighted that they could go home after all, and we were no worse off than when we tried to fly standby on a full plane.

After we de-planed and everything settled down, I talked to the ticket agent about our reservation for the morning flight.  She said that since it was less than 24 she could just print out boarding passes right then, and that would make our morning go a little easier.  The morning flight was scheduled to board at 6:25 a.m.

The only thing on the kids mind now was food!  As we left the gate and headed to the food courtyard, it was quite evident that the food operations closed at 10, and it was now 10:15.  So, we made arrangements for a hotel with a shuttle service that would pick us up.  When we drove up to the hotel, Jake noted that his favorite restaurant, Taco Bell, was just a block away!  So, we checked into our rooms, and met in the lobby to embark on our search for food!  We walked briskly towards the neon bell, only to discover that the restaurant was closed.  Only the drive up window was open.  And, as some of you know, they will not serve walkups at a drive up window.  Taco Bell is out!

So, no problem.  We had walked across the Carl's Jr. restaurant to get to Taco Bell.  But as we returned to Carl's, it was apparent that none of us had realized that Carl's was closed at 10 as well!  We had also passed by a gas station that had a mini-mart and a little restaurant called the Chicken Basket.  Now, not to any surprise, the Chicken Basket had not been open all day because it was Easter!

It is interesting how good those pre-made sandwiches in the refrigerator look when you haven't eaten for eleven hours!  We all grabbed our favorite sandwich, a bag of chips, a drink, and an ice cream Drum Stick!  After moving things around the room a bit, we were able to set up dinner in my hotel room, where we ate, laughed, and thought back about our adventurous day!

It was about midnight when we finished dinner.  Time to get to bed.  It turned out that that the hotel shuttle left on the hour for the airport.  Trying to do the math in my head as quickly as possible, I realized that we could not take the 6 a.m. shuttle, because 25 minutes was not enough time to assure a prompt arrival at the departure gate.  So we had to be on the 5 a.m. shuttle!  That meant we all needed a wake up call at 4:45 a.m.  So the sleep in the night just felt like a blink.  I was in the hallway at 5 minutes to 5.  In a minute, Kara came out of her room, ready to go.  I had her knock on Jake and Tylers room, but there was no answer.  I thought maybe they had already gone downstairs.  But Kara said she could hear voices.  On closer inspection, it looked like the boys never closed their door tight when they went to bed.  I pushed it open to see the TV running, and both of them sound asleep!!!  I told them to get out of bed and that they had three minutes to be downstairs.  I left to make sure the shuttle bus held up for a few minutes so they could get on the shuttle.  But, in three minutes, they were both down in the lobby getting on the bus!  Great come back boys!

With the early shuttle ride, we had time for a little breakfast at the airport and then onto our gate.  We were in boarding group 4, so most everyone was on the plane.  When they called our group and Kara finally got to the person scanning boarding passes, hers made a distinctive loud beep!  A loud beep is never good. After three tries, she told Kara to step to the side, and the performance was repeated with Tyler and Jake.  She asked me if I was with those three.  It was sort of the kiss of death. I admitted to being with them, and sure enough, I got the loud beep treatment as well.  We all stepped aside.  Everyone else boarded the plane.  We were in familiar territory now!  It turned out that when we were boarded on the standby flight the night before, our reservation got canceled for the morning flight.  When we got kicked off that flight, no one bothered to reschedule us for the morning flight again!  God was looking out after us . . . there were enough empty seats on the plane that they could still put us on the flight!

I think Jake summed it up best when he said, "I think we have just about experienced everything that could go wrong at an airport!"

The rest is history.  We had an uneventful drive home with the exception of the long dreamed of food stop at Taco Bell!

Saturday, April 19, 2014

Our hotel made us a great breakfast this morning.  It put us in a happy mood and made us ready for the day.  We headed off to church in downtown Montego Bay.  The taxi drove by the location where we thought the church was located.  But we were told that the church building was for sale and the congregation was building a new church.  While only the second floor of what will be a three story building was poured, about 600 members were meeting in the daylight basement area of the church!  This would not happen in Redding!  But, there was a sea of folding chairs, and nicely dressed Sabbath keepers seated throughout this unfinished area.

There were four or five people who were to be baptised who stood in front of the church and answered affirmatively to keeping and believing in each of the fundamental beliefs of the church before  they could be accepted to for baptism.  Several in our group noted that there were a lot fewer conditions to being baptised in Jesus' time than now. (We have some sharp people on this trip!)

They had me get up and tell a little bit about our group, and to bring greetings from Redding, CA, which seems to be a Jamaican tradition, as I was invited to do the same thing in the Christian Fellowship Church the Sunday before!  If I had to take a vote, I think most everyone felt a little closer to God in the little church in the mountains as opposed to the big church in the city.  Good things to spend some thought time trying to figure out why.

We had lunch and then spent the afternoon seeing some of the remarkable sea life that calls Jamaica home.  The prize find was a sand stingray.  The eel was a close second!  It rained most of the afternoon, so we headed up to the hotel where the students voted to eat pizza for the second night in a row, and the adults had choices from the hotel restaurant.

For worship, each person took a turn talking about what the trip meant to them.  There have been great lessons learned, and we are all closer for the experience.  Some of the ideas that were expressed were:

• Hard work builds stronger friendships
• There is something very satisfying about accomplishing something as a team
• People are much the same around the world.
• Happiness does not come from stuff, it comes from within.
• Being disconnected from the stress of home for a week can be a good thing
• Working together, we each made a positive impact on each other
• There are many Christians around the world.  Many are not from our church.
• We can have a positive impact wherever we are.

I couldn't be more proud of our kids. They have been nothing short of awesome this entire trip.

Tomorrow we are looking forward to our trip back to America.  But it will be with very fond memories of our new friends we have made in this beautiful country called Jamaica!

Friday, April 18, 2014

This morning, we ate our last breakfast prepared by the breakfast ladies.  One of them gets up at 4 a.m. to walk to our church home so that breakfast can be out by 7:30.  After cleaning up and getting our bus loaded we headed back to our hotel in Montego Bay.  We arrived at 10 a.m.  The hotel was very nice to let us check in that early!  Most people who regularly stay in nice resorts would probably not be to happy with our hotel.  It is not on the beach, it does not have all the modern amenities, but we are sleeping on beds instead of the floor, the rooms are air conditioned, water in the shower is warm, we haven't seen any bugs in the rooms, there is a small pool to swim in, and it has a great view of the ocean!  So, we think it is pretty fine!!

We walked down to the ocean front stores for some lunch and our waiter asked us who we were and what we were doing.  We told him we were working on a project in Catadupa.  He smiled and told us that is where he grew up!  Then he told us he attended the Adventist church in that community!  There was an instant bond when we told him we were Adventists as well.  We had good food, and made a new friend!

Tomorrow, we will attempt to find the closest Adventist church and see how they take to eighteen people, many of which do not own any clean clothes at this point!

Thursday, April 17, 2014

Our work day started out much the same as it has for the past four days.  Up at around 7, breakfast at 7:30, and on the bus by 8:30 to ride to our project in Cambridge, about 20 minutes away.

The bus ride is like it is in so many other countries.  The bus looks pretty nice on the outside, and a little worn on the inside.  We get on the bus with our two supervisors in the morning.  With the driver that would make 21 total passengers on a bus that will seat 24 if you include the seats that fold down into the isles.  For some reason, I think that the bus has been chartered for us, but it is clear that if it is a bus, that is going the right direction, and particularly if one of our supervisors happens to know them, the bus is open to them as well.  And since the charter has been paid for, there is no bus fare required!!  Needless to say, these supervisors know a lot of people!!  This morning I think there were nearly 40 people on the bus!  It was really hard not to get acquainted!

For work today, our supervisors built a horizontal bond beam on the retaining wall that we started yesterday.  Our team build the reinforcing steel cage that goes inside the bond beam.  Of course the bond beam needs to be filled with concrete, which meant a bucket brigade of hauling 24 buckets of sand and 40 buckets of gravel to the mixing pad on the road in front of retaining wall!  We are very experience at this task now and can do it without assistance!

While the concrete was being mixed, a smaller team was working on laying block on the side retaining wall that is stair stepped up the side of the yard.  All hard labor.  There must be something we are paying for.

For the last hour of the day, some foolishly thought that we might just have the afternoon off.  The reality call was from Pastor Gordon as he told us that there was a teacher at the school who had three children of her own.  She was working on an addition for her small house.  She had a perimeter foundation and walls build for the room, but needed to fill in the space between the foundation walls so that a slab could be poured.  She had arranged to have a dump truck load of fill dirt dumped on the abandoned railroad tracks about 150 feet from the room.  She had been carrying the fill dirt in a bucket from the pile to the house for some time . . . a very slow process.  In about 50 minutes, with our now perfected chain gang bucket brigade we were able to move all the dirt back to the room so that she could start preparing for the slab.  She was so grateful!  I think she personally thanked every person on our team.  It was hard work, in the sun for most of the project, but seeing how happy she was made it so worth the little extra effort it took to meet her needs.

We posed for our last photo at the site, said farewells to our new friends, wiped away a few tears and headed back to our temporary home.  We were blessed by a rainstorm that lasted for an hour or so, which helped to cool the evening and set up the perfect conditions for a great meal, a great sunset, and a great end to our work week.

For worship this evening, Spencer and Jake talked about how good it has felt to communicate face to face instead of text to text and how closer we all feel when we don’t depend on technology to connect with each other.  It was a great discussion.

Wednesday April 16, 2014

I’m sitting here in the breezeway of the church that also serves as a classroom and dinner seating.  We watch the sun set each evening over the tropical Jamaican landscape under the cooling grey clouds.  A nice way to reflect on the day.

But, I should start with a little story from last night.  After lights were out a few minutes, there appeared a blinking light in the rafters.  The usual suspects of a laser light or some other student driven prank were quickly dismissed as we determined that it was a fire fly blinking.  These are pretty large fire flies.  The light is about a quarter of an inch across. Quite impressive.  Once it took off, it headed to the girls side of the room.  We knew it was over there because of all the screaming that was occurring over there.  But then, it headed back over the wall and headed straight for Jake!  He was holding his own flashlight.  As the fire fly landed on him and then started flying around him, Jake was quite animated as he jumped around the room trying the ditch the fire fly.  With his own flash light moving frantically around the room as he was trying to redirect the insect, made it look like he was moving to a strobe light.  While we wanted to sincerely identify with Jake’s terrifying situation, laughing was the only thing we could come up with!

Today, we took on a fairly aggressive task.  We moved sand and gravel up hill to a new mixing site, where we made concrete.  Then we used the bucket brigade method to move the concrete up a steep hill to the footing of a retaining wall.  Everyone worked like dogs today, and you just have to know how hard a dog can work!  It was really hot this morning.  I was really proud of how everyone worked together on this phase of the project. It was very tiring work, and everyone jumped in and helped.  The latter part of the day was devoted to laying block on the two retaining walls, which was a learning experience for many.

This afternoon, we quit a half hour early so that we could go to the make shift market that was set up for our shopping convenience!  Most were vendors selling clothes that they would make in the next two days and deliver to the church where we are staying.  It was interesting that all the lady merchants go to the same fabric store and all buy the same patterns of material, which I guess helps to simplify things.  You just have to find the person you like to work with or find the person with the right price!  I was a nice diversion to our regular evenings.

Tomorrow is our last work day.  We will be looking at Thursday with mixed emotions.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Last night, the food ladies talked to us about how things were going.  We had been just a little short of food on a couple of meals, so I let them know that just a little more food would be great.  This morning was the first meal after our talk . . . clearly more food than we could eat!  We are being treated quite well in the food department!

At the jobsite, we started off by working on removing dirt from the hillside.  More boulders to uncover, and dirt to haul to the back of the retaining wall in buckets.  We actually got to the point where they said “stop digging!”  We thought that signaled a move to an easier job – which of course turned out to be a foolish assumption!

We packed sand and gravel about 150 feet to the mixing location in the middle of the driveway.  There we mixed concrete by hand to fill the footing of the retaining wall that is being built.  Two and a half hours later we had it complete!  It was very satisfying to complete the project, but once again, we are pretty tired.  Our only issue was dealing with a neighbor who had partaken of way too much rum in the morning.  Our sponsors let him stick around and work.  They said the more he worked with us, the faster the alcohol would wear off.  He wasn’t a particular problem to us.  He was just a problem to himself.  But on the bright side, he gave several of us a big hug before he left for the day!

We were covered in concrete and when we got back to our home at the church, those cold showers still felt pretty good tonight!

The food ladies branched out a little tonight and fed us breadfruit, beans and rice, stir-fried vegetables, fish, chicken, salad and fruit punch.  Life is good!

Monday, April 14, 2014

Well, today was the day of reckoning!  We were put to work at a church and school in a neighboring town.  Today, we dug footings for two retaining walls, and excavated dirt by hand from an upward sloping hill adjacent to the church. Late in the day, four students tied steel to be put in the footing of the wall.  We learned many things today. Jamaicans can work harder and tolerate the heat a lot better than we can (although Darren Smith gave them a run for their money!  He was nick named “Dynamite” for his ability to dig out large rocks!).  We learned that we can drink a lot more water in a day than we originally thought.  We learned that a personal week’s worth of Gatorade can be consumed by the group in a single day.  And we learned that a cold shower can be one of the most wonderful feelings at the end of the day.

We were led by “Mr. T” and “Mr. Rose” who are awesome workers and made our long hot day a lot of fun as they are both real jokers.  Phyllis is another person assigned to our group.  She shoveled dirt, moved rocks, and hauled buckets of dirt with the rest of us.

We are all showered and fed, and while we feel good about what we accomplished today, we are also very tired.  It will be early to bed tonight.

They are starting to introduce some local delicacies to us.  Tonight, we had breadfruit, which tasted very similar to a potato.  It was very tasty.  We have had some papaya for breakfast as well as some great pineapple.

The “Ladies Department” of the church sells soda and ice cream for a dollar each.  We have been trying to be supportive of their ministry!!!

I think Kara and Jacob E have worship to night.  I’m looking forward to hearing their perspective on the day, the things they are seeing and experiencing.

The entire group was awesome today.  Hard work. Team effort.  Fun spirit!