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We made it safely to Papua New Guinea. I’m currently sitting out on a covered deck listening to rain tinkle its way down the metal roof to the gutters and drip, drip its way to the downspouts. Some sort of tropical bird is singing. Yesterday I saw fruit bats the size of Welsh Corgis flying around the palm trees at twilight. I saw only one spider which was so small it’s not worth mentioning really, but I did anyway. I’m eating a banana that’s so good it makes the bananas at home taste like the fake fruit your grandma has on her coffee table. I’m up before dawn because my body is really confused as to what time it is. It’s also a little crampy in the stomach region. We’ll see how that develops. But what about our trip here?
Apparently when missionaries would leave for the field in the olden days, they would pack all their belongs into a coffin. It was a nice sturdy box full of empty space and space is a commodity you shouldn’t waste when you travel. Also, they likely weren’t coming back and I guess they didn’t build coffins where they were going and so they took one with them. But as we packed to leave for Papua New Guinea, I realized we would never fit all our belongings into a coffin. Maybe if we were allotted one coffin per family member, which I guess is a reasonable expectation, we could get closer to that goal but in all reality we’d need so many coffins that our departure would look like an undertaker’s convention. People would walk past and shudder, thinking something tragic took place.
Our original tickets with Philippine Air gave us an allotment of one free, fifty pound bag per person. It cost $100 per bag after that, up to ten bags per person. Since the tickets were the cheapest around, I was willing to pay a little extra for baggage. Paying for baggage is also far cheaper than shipping something with whatever questionable couriers work between here and there. We were planning on taking two bags each, plus we had a 4’ shipping cube in a container we were allowed to use. The container will take months to show up and so we put heavy things in there we didn’t need right away, like rolled up foam mattresses – the ones you buy in the mail and they come all squished in a box. Apparently mattresses in PNG are really poor quality and really expensive. “Bring a mattress” was one of the top suggestions when we asked our fellow missionaries what to bring.
After the U.S. Postal Service delivered our visas to the wrong house a day after we were scheduled to depart America, we canceled our original flights and booked with Qatar Airlines because they were cheaper and left sooner and we were sick of waiting to leave. Qatar gave us three free bags per passenger. We were delirious with extra room but we had already packed, given away, or thrown out everything that didn’t fit in our two-bag-per-person quota. So we bought one extra duffel and filled it full of creature comforts like cheese, chocolate, and cereal. We didn’t really know what we’d be unable to find in Papua New Guinea. With our luck we’d find ourselves stationed beside a cheese factory and not need any of the twenty five pounds we packed. So we just blazed through Aldi like we were shopping for a family of twelve and just guessed at what we’d really want later.
After our shopping bonanza, we were still well under our suitcase allotment but later I would thank God we didn’t pack more!
The traveling went as well as it could, up until the end, at least. Our journey started in Columbus, Ohio. We flew a short hop to Philadelphia and then boarded a flight for Doha, Qatar. This flight was 12 hours long, but it was an overnight flight so the kids slept well. It’s the most sleep we had on the whole trip. It’s still amazing to me that in that 12 hours you can find yourself smack in the middle of a Middle East desert, right there beside Iran and Oman and Somalia and all those other countries with camels and oil and pirates. I was hoping the Ayatollah would keep his nuclear program under wraps for at least our nine hour layover. Then again, some people find nine hour layovers scarier than Iran’s nuclear program. Actually, we met an Iranian couple who was very nice and who were also on their way to Papua New Guinea where the husband was a visiting professor of technology. I hope he’s in charge of Iran’s nuclear program as well, because he seemed very nice and reasonable.
Doha was an incredibly nice airport but in a very sterile, elitist way. It was all marble and clockwork. When our traveling circus collapsed over several benches and collectively sighed so hard we blew ferns out of several flowerbeds around us, an airport worker curtly reminded us there’s a designated place for us to relax in. Maybe we should go there. He seemed to indicate the benches were for travelers. I’m not sure what he thought we were because we definitely weren’t locals.
We did find the designated relaxing area. It was a huge indoor garden complete with a waterfall, trees, and patches of fake turf. There were some very artistic, modern looking wood shelters set up in the park designed to give travelers the sense of camping, I believe. So many people were draped over every horizontal surface that it looked like a camping style typically only seen in San Fransisco or Portland. I’m not sure it’s what the architects had in mind when they designed it. We found our own spot to squat and soon the kids were sleeping. Apparently they were tired because they slept for four hours lying face first on artificial turf. I tried to sleep but decided someone should stay up and make sure no one stole a backpack or one of our children. Of course, if someone did steal a child, I expect they’d return them within several minutes since carrying around an object as lovable as a honey badger and as calm as a tornado siren is about as tolerable as doing jumping jacks on Legos.
All in all, Adi and Elliot traveled well. Oliver did not, which brings me to a great irony. The people who need the sleep the most cannot sleep because they are exerting all their energy making children sleep who do not want to sleep because they are too dumb to know they need it. The only people who realize how blissful sleep is (and want it more than anything) are the very ones prevented from partaking in it by little people who need it but refuse it. This process has the same effect on a marriage as pouring sand in an engine has on a car. Still, the traveling had only begun.
Our next flight was to Singapore. This one was eight hours long and was a miserable cycle of trying to sleep and then being awakened by flight attendants asking me if I wanted anything to eat. Usually sleeping and eating are my two favorite things to do but I found that if I must go without one or the other, I’d choose to go without food. You can always buy it later. Sleep cannot be bought. That didn’t stop us from trying though. We bought a bucket of melatonin laced gummies (melatonin is a chemical produced by your body that makes you feel sleepy) to feed the kids as snacks but with mixed results.
We found Singapore airport was nice and had more of a friendly feel to it than Doha. We ate at Burger King for lunch. That’s not very exotic but when you’ve traveled so long that you’ve lost the ability do do normal bodily functions like maintaining a heart rate or breathing, trying new things doesn’t excite you.
After our four-and-a-half hour layover, we flew to Port Moresby on Air Nguini, the national airline of Papua New Guinea. This flight gave us a sense that we were leaving the world of wealthy globe trotters behind.
In several hours we had gone from poor, peasant Americans in Doha to the wealthy upper crust in Papua New Guinea.
We landed in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea! We faced another nine hour layover. I spent the time sitting on my bum with my feet slightly elevated, trying to let the swelling go down. My ankles swelled so much that I hardly recognized them. It looked like they were made of marshmallows. Same color too. We were probably the whitest people on the island at that point, being fresh out of an Ohio winter.
After a bit I wandered around the airport, bought a PNG sim card for my iPhone, and talked to the salesman at the phone desk. A lot of people in Port Moresby know English in varying degrees and communication wasn’t too much of an issue. The further in the bush you go, the less English you find. If you go far enough, you won’t even find pidgin (a very common trade language), only tribal tongues. But I hadn’t ventured that far yet. In fact, I was still stuck in Port Moresby airport.
We had traveled sixty hours or so and were running on probably eight hours of sleep, gathered in half hour segments between throes of butt numbing misery. We smelled of death and despair, despite giving ourselves a wipe down with wet wipes in the restrooms of the Doha airport. We had arrived at Port Moresby at 5 am that morning. We had an afternoon flight to our final destination of Wewak. It was a short flight, only an hour and a half, but it was the only way to get there. Wewak has no roads connecting it to the rest of the country. I was told by Chris, our Medical-And-Everything-Else-Director at Samaritan Aviation, that afternoon flights often get canceled.
“Always try to fly in the morning,” he said, “there’s a greater than fifty percent chance of the afternoon flights getting canceled.”
Unfortunately for us, the afternoon flight was the only one of the day so we hitched our wagon to those mules and hoped they would stampede down the right road.
Finally, after waiting for nine hours in an airport filled with the slowest clocks ever, our boarding time had arrived. We had watched four other flights get canceled, and with each cancellation a crowd of muttering passengers got up from the gate and grumbled their way back into the terminal to reschedule. I was begging and pleading with God not to let our flight get canceled.
“I will not survive,” I told God. “I will die,” I clarified, making sure God was clear on the consequences.
The clocks ticked past boarding time. Finally the loudspeakers squawked to life, announcing information for passengers of Flight 140. That was us! We gritted our teeth. Were we boarding or stuck in Port Moresby for the night? Despite my pleas to the Almighty, our flight was canceled and we were stuck in Port Moresby for the night. We all sighed and looked at each other through dreary eyes. We probably would’ve cried but all our fluid was down around our ankles.
This meant we had to claim all of our thirteen bags and drag them to a hotel for the night. The airline was going to pay for a hotel but as I stood behind a mass of fellow travelers at the service counter, all piled up in front of a single airline worker, the prospects of leaving the airport any time soon looked grim. I sighed and closed my eyes and felt the will to live leave my body. Except I didn’t die. That would be too easy. My fate was to stand there for eternity wishing I were dead.
That’s when Maryleen said, “Hello! You come with me.” I didn’t know her name was Maryleen at that point. All I knew is that she had a reflective yellow vest on and she spoke some English so I went with her to the side door of the customer service counter and watched her accost a man who came out.
“This man has little children who need to sleep. You need to get him a hotel right away.”
The man nodded, took my ticket stubs, and scribbled something on a piece of paper and disappeared.
“You wait here,” Maryleen said.
Sure. I had nothing else to do.
I learned later that Maryleen was a “Big Boss” in the customer service department for Air Nguni Airlines. After striking up a conversation with the exhausted white family sitting the floor, Maryleen and Janice become quick friends. She was moved to help us find a hotel and I praise God for that. Maryleen was a literal God send for our family. I was slowly dying in that line like a lost cowboy crawling through the desert without a horse.
While I waited outside the door, I met another missionary named Nathan. Nathan looked me over and summed up the situation well; “Man, You look wasted!” I had an obligatory conversation with Nathan. I felt like since he was talking to me it would’ve been rude to just grunt. I had little energy to care what we talked about. Fortunately Nathan didn’t wait for me to ask for help, he just insisted on it.
“Let me help you move your bags. How many do you have?”
“Thirteen,” I said in quiet dread while staring at the wall blankly. I was afraid he’d gasp and quickly leave.
He had lived in Papua New Guinea for several months and knew the airport well. At more than six foot tall, he took command easily. I felt like his words carried better because they weren’t blocked by other people’s heads like mine were. I followed him like a stray puppy with my tail between my legs. He had obviously slept in the last twenty four hours and so I was more than willing to defer all decision making entirely to him. I’m glad he was an honest individual.
We ended up taking two shuttles back to our airport in the middle of a tropical downpour. We finally crashed at the hotel for five hours, woke up at 2 am, and took two shuttles back to the airport again. We then waited outside the airport for two hours, met an incredibly friendly national named Solomon who helped us through security in time to make our flight, waited briefly at the gate, and flew out of Port Moresby at 5 am. We arrived in Wewak around 6:30 am on Tuesday or Saturday or something in between. One hundred and three hours (not an exaggeration) after we left our driveway for Columbus airport, we were in our Papua New Guinean home. We were delighted to see familiar faces!
As I laid in bed that evening thinking about how many people were involved in getting us to this tiny point on the map, I had a realization. There’s purpose in pain so God doesn’t usually rescue us from it. But he does help us through it, typically through other people. I find the best thing I can do when I feel overwhelmed with debt from others’ generosity is to simply help someone else with the same generosity that’s been shown me. And in doing so, I’m God’s hands helping them as they work through their pain. Solomon, Maryleen, and Nathan were those helping hands God knew I needed. I was not dead because of them.
Also, I’m realizing more every day that the calling to be a missionary isn’t a calling on an individual, it’s a calling on a community. And our community has answered the call. Thank you all for carrying us here. Adventure awaits!
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