It’s the end of a long travel day.
After meeting at the church at 9 AM, the team was surprised by several friends (and some former missioners from past years), who came to wish us well. Our goal was to be on the road at 9:30, and the bus did, in fact, pull out onto Peninsula right on time after one last prayer together.
It’s 250 miles to the Miami Airport, and, with one gas stop, one bathroom stop, and a quick meeting in Hollywood, where Martha Rutland met us with a large box of Spanish coloring books (which we managed to stuff into the already overstuffed bags), we made it to MIA. Debbie drove the entire trip.
Debbie and Becky delivered the bus to the nearby Ebeneezer Methodist church. At this point, the famous yellow T-shirts worked again, with the group being pulled away from the usual long check-in lines and taken to our own check-in counter. The Airbus-300 pulled away from the gate on time.
The flight was uneventful, the majority of it being in the dark. The terminal in Lima is different, and we were let out of the plane via a long stairway and taken to the building in busses. Lima is quite cool/cold and misty here on the coast. We sailed through the passport checks quickly, but then we hit our first little snag.
The Peruvian Customs agents didn’t bat an eye when looking at all our drugs and supplies, but for some reason our big suitcase full of glasses and sunglasses caught their eye. The first guy raised his eyebrows and had to” go get the glasses specialist.” The next guy looked through all the glasses and decided we could not take them with us unless we paid him $100 (American dollars). Of course – and apparently to their surprise – we said “no,” so now Becky’s sturdy suitcase is sitting in their offices waiting for us to either pay the money or to pick it all back up when we’re ready to fly out of the country.
So, after all the collecting, packing, and transporting, they’ve taken away all our glasses for this trip. This is one of the challenges of trips to places like this, and we were told later that this kind of behavior is common for these agents.
As promised, James was waiting on us, and had some helpers to load the 1300 pounds of luggage onto a small bus. The 30-minute trip to the Maria Luisa Hotel was interrupted momentarily by a young man rushing up to bang loudly on Jennifer’s window. The driver pulled away quickly, and James said that, had the window been open, he would have tried to reach in and steal anything he could have grabbed. Jennifer did not even flinch – we think she was too tired to react.
The hotel has no heat, but it does have lukewarm running water.
It’s after midnight, and these missioners are beat. We’ll be ready to leave in the morning for our one-hour flight across the Andes to Pucallpa, and to the Watts’ home base. To sleep….
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