I never cease to be amazed at the Lord’s hand working in my
life, but some examples are more incredible than others. Enter, story…
My squad was in Nairobi having our mid-term/Africa debrief.
One day, while searching for the internet my dear friends and I met an amazing
American woman at the mall and ended up at her house the next day for snacks
and doing laundry and all over just being spoiled. I can’t really write this
any better than my friend Tracy already has. We all left that day so thankful
for our new friend who blessed us immensely and who we felt we had known
forever.
Then fast forward a few days to travel day to Thailand.
Since I had never actually unpacked my bag at this hostel in Nairobi, I
procrastinated to the last minute to get my things together. In the mix of all
this, I decided to put my passport somewhere easy to grab when we get to the
airport. My passport… yes, my passport… where did I put that? Insert half an
hour of 5 girls (thank you, ladies!) checking and re-checking every possible
(and some impossible) places. No passport. We are leaving momentarily to get on
a bus to the airport, to go to Thailand… and I ain’t got no passport.
As my squad leaders put their heads together and start
making phone calls, Emily and I make a call of our own to our friend from the
other day… her husband works for the US embassy, and in a matter of minutes she
is on her way to the embassy and has paperwork in hand for me. Next I need to
go to a police station and file a report for a lost/stolen passport and get new
photos. She says I can even stay with her while this all gets figured out.
Shucks. Really?
Return to the land of family and Christmas? Yes please.
When I got back to this house, the father of the family said
‘So I hear you fake lost your passport?’ Well, I really did lose it, but I’m
not going to call this leg of the journey suffering for Jesus. More like that
part where Paul talks about knowing how to be abased and how to abound.
I cannot travel around Nairobi, let alone travel to Thailand
by myself, so I get an assigned buddy- our newest squad leader Garrett, who had
literally been on the job for about 27 hours at that point. (Subsequently,
Garrett is on my new team, and I do not know him very well, so I am stoked for
the opportunity to get some time with him.) Garrett and I grab a cab as we wave
goodbye to the other 41 members of our squad. We head to the Kenyan police
station as they head to Thailand.
The police station runs smoothly. We rendezvous with our American
friend, Naoma, at the mall where we had met her a few days earlier. She graciously
takes us around town. We go to get passport photos for me and the first one is
real cute because I am smiling. But my sweet Kenyan photographer tells me I
cannot smile. So I do a dead-pan one, and… it looks like death. So, we take one
more with ‘a little smile’ and this is what we get. Not bad if I say so
myself… definitely an upgrade from my last passport picture where I looked like
a Russian immigrant, but I say again I did NOT lose my passport on purpose.
The soonest appointment I can make is early Monday morning,
meaning Garrett and I have to spend the weekend in Nairobi, but the next two
days it felt more like we were in America. We went to the pool, enjoyed a fun dinner
party, and (a strange first for me) went to the driving range and hit golf
balls. (You never know what the Race will bring your way, it could be tearing
the heads off of fish, digging a mud pit, or going to the driving range… more
often than not the fish thing though.) We also spent time with the family’s
amazing kids, swapped stories with the parents, and busted out the guitar on a
few occasions.
Without going into detail, and because I do not know the
details, the dad works for the embassy doing something super awesome. We joked
together about the house being bugged… and it was all fun and games until we
went upstairs to lock the house down for the evening and saw this huge, and
kind of scary looking door, which Naoma calmly told us was in case of a coup.
The whole family sleeps on this side in safety and the rest of the house is up
for the taking in a worse case scenario. Garrett and I just looked at each
other… of course… in case of a coup. Perfectly natural.
So, more time goes by. We start to catch up with the rest of
our squad from Bangkok over skype and facebook… and truly it feels like we are
in America. Odd to be the only people we really know in Nairobi in this little
house… having a blast. Naoma even accompanied me to get my haircut short, which
I have wanted to do for years and finally decided to do on the Race.
We filled more time with Star Wars movies (for which I got
in a ‘heated’ debate with a 6 year old about whether or not Darth Vadar dies in
Luke’s dream sequence on Dagobah) and Wii, and fires in the fireplace, and
reading Dawn Treader and parts of the Long Winter, and good sleep and skyping
the fam. It was a restful season (albeit only a few days) that was a blessing
from the Lord.
Today was finally Monday. I got to live my Bourne Identity
dream and go to the US Embassy (while G stayed outside with his terrorist
beard), and honestly it was a bit of a letdown. I sort of thought I would come
in contact with many Americans, and I’m not sure… maybe someone would offer me
a coke or something. Nope. [Word of wisdom to future WRers: make SURE to bring
a copy or two of your passport and license, AND if you ever loose your passport
first thing to do is file a police report. The police report was what got me
through three lines of security- not me saying ‘I’m an American citizen.’] I
only saw maybe 5 Americans the whole time I was there and it was a lot of ‘sit
over here’, ‘no, go over there’, ‘you need to be in this line’, ‘you are in the
wrong line’… I was asking for prayer for favor and I think it came in the form
of 1 of the 5 Americans I saw… this one lady who worked there saw me and pretty
much took me under her wing to make sure I got to the right place. A few hours
and a pile of paperwork later, and I have a new temporary (6 month) passport
that looks like I could’ve made in my high school art class.
But, it works! I made it out of Kenya on Tuesday, even
though the un-amused immigration worker said something about me ‘not having a
status’ she stamped that baby anyhow. So, I guess that’s the end of the story.
The story of God putting an amazing stranger in my path at just the right
moment to be a help and a blessing. The story of God using a semi-stressful
situation and turning it into nothing but good. The story of Darth Vadar and haircuts and coups. Garrett
drew a picture that demonstrates our time this week fairly accurately:
Thank you Jesus! Thank you Family!
The End.
