We made it!

We are finally here in Kalene, Zambia. Our long 24 hour trip somehow turned into nearly 60 hours. With delayed flights and missed connections, messed up boarding passes and visa misunderstandings, we made it here, by the Lord’s grace. I’m so thankful that we are now settled into our house here on the compound. I’ll share our traveling experience with you, not to be dramatic but to bring Christ the glory because it was truly Him who brought us here. Following is the long version for those of you that are interested.

We packed our vehicle and headed to the Columbus airport at 2:00 Monday afternoon. Our flight was departing at 5:30 and so we got there 2 hours early. Our 300 pounds of luggage, (airplane parts, clothes and food) was hauled into the airport, along with our carry ons, a car seat and a stroller.

We went to the ticket counter to get our boarding passes and ran into an issue. The lady told us that we had to have a letter confirming our visas before we could go. This was news to us because we had been told that we could just get our visas once we reached Zambia. We spent close to 2 hours waiting on her to make phone calls and such, finally she agreed to let us go anyways, because she said we still had time to acquire the letter. She went on to the next procedure, and discovered that our 5:30 plane was delayed and wouldn’t arrive until 8:30, and we would miss our connection to Johannesburg, South Africa. She was able to get us on an earlier flight but we still missed our connection. We landed in Atlanta 5 min before our connection departed. It was late and we had to gather all of our luggage and spend the night in a hotel. We were able to get on the next flight to Johannesburg that left Tuesday evening at 8:30. We spent most of the day at the hotel and headed back to the airport. Again we checked in, again the visa letter was mentioned, but Brad had done research the night before and knew that it didn’t apply to us, so he was gentle but firm and she gave us our boarding passes. We got to the gate an hour early. The flight ahead of us at our gate was still there and departed late. When we finally boarded the plane we sat there for about an hour before we took off. The longest leg of our flight, 15 hours, went better than I expected. No, we didn’t get a lot of sleep, but it went well.

We landed in Johannesburg, and again, almost weirdly so, our connecting flight was departing in 5 min. Same story all over again. We were exhausted from the flight and now this again. We waited at the Delta counter for nearly 2 hours for someone to come and reschedule our connection and get a hotel for us. In South Africa things don’t happen fast. When someone finally came it was a huge mess of confusion. They finally got boarding pass vouchers for us, although they didn’t have one for the baby. Brad questioned the man about that but he said “No problem, they will fix it in the morning, everything will be fine.” In the morning, Brad got up early and went to the ticket desk to get our boarding passes and they said that he didn’t have one, and there was nothing they could do. No one would help. Brad tried to make some phone calls and they wouldn’t go through. Our flight to Lusaka was leaving at 10:30am and we were running out of time. It felt like such a strong oppression of spiritual warfare. We were frustrated, tired and desperate to get to our destination. Then the Lord broke the wall of darkness, and someone helped us straighten out the missing boarding pass situation, we walked straight through an empty security line that was packed only 10 minutes earlier, all the elevators were empty and waiting at our floor, we found our boarding gate and had 15 min to spare. Thank you Lord! We flew to Lusaka and met John, the missionary from Mission Flight Services who had come to pick us up.

He took us to the missions guest house in Lusaka, and in the morning, we boarded the mission plane and flew the final 3 hours to the mission. I was so happy to finally get to our destination. Thank you so much for your prayers. I praise the Lord that Satan is defeated and we are here at last.