48 Hours

Well, it is currently 10:45 a.m.  The 29 of us met at Dallas Fort/Worth International Airport on Saturday morning at 8:00 a.m.  Nearly 48 hours later, we all FINALLY arrived in Lima.  Here’s how it happened…

The 1:35 a.m. flight that we thought we were booked on was a hoax.  Apparently the ticket agent printed 30 fake tickets to appease us.  So when we tried to check in at the gate, we learned that the flight was full.  We were not going to Peru.  Then they decided that 10 of us could go after all – but when those 10 went to check in, they said that we had not arrived early enough, so they would not let them on the plane.  Ironically, we had been sitting at the gate for over three hours!

After much consternation and prayer, we finally headed to the Hilton Miami Airport, where we spent the rest of the night (we arrived there after 2:30 a.m.).  The next morning, we were back to the airport to start all over.  Nine people in our group were confirmed on the 11:55 p.m. flight to Lima last night, and the rest of us were confirmed on the 5:30 p.m. and 11:55 p.m. flights today.

To make a long story short, we were all able to get to Lima last night by flying standby.  God was definitely in charge here – one of the travelers at the 5:30 gate flies the Miami-Lima route frequently, and he mentioned that those flights were typically full.  Standby passengers don’t usually get on.  But we did!

When the first group arrived in Lima, we had the daunting task of locating all of the luggage for our group – which had arrived 24 hours earlier on our original flight.  The luggage process took THREE HOURS…but thankfully, ALL of our luggage had arrived, and they had kept it in a safe place until we arrived.  Needless to say, we all breathed a huge sigh of relief.

The first group arrived at the Miraflores Colon Hotel in Lima at about 2:00 a.m., and the second group arrived at about 6:30 a.m.  So…

WE ARE ALL HERE!  We are planning to take it relatively easy today – we are having an orientation meeting and then we are heading to the orphanage to play with the kids for the afternoon.  We will start our VBS and construction projects tomorrow.

Thank you SO MUCH to all of those of you who have been praying for us for the past two days.  God has been good.  There are so many ways in which our experience could have been so much worse, but at every turn God was providing and helping us to maintain good attitudes.

I really believe that God wanted to help us to bond together as a team and to cause us to let go of ourselves before we got here.  We are all excited and ready to go.  We will update more tonight after we have time to go to the orphanage!