On December 8th, Gap V was headed into month four with a pretty low key travel day. We planned to get to the Lima airport in time for a fancy dinner in an airport food court. (I’m talking to you Papa Johns.) 33 people on the squad would take a 3am flight to Colombia with a 7 hour layover, then a quick flight form there to Guatemala City. 7 other people had a flight to El Salvador, than an even shorter flight to Guatemala. All in all, about as easy of a country change as it gets for the World Race. I even bragged about how chill this would be to a few racers before we left our hostel in Lima.
My bragging was some sort of curse I put on myself, and I didn’t know it yet.
Once we got to the airport, my coleader Stephen and a logistics leader tried to check in super early just to see if we could. We got our boarding passes and I realized that the people flying to Bogota, Colombia had their flight pushed up 2 hours, from 3:30am to 1:30am, and I would be the only squad leader flying with the big group. That’s right, just me and thirty three 19 year olds. Cue faster heart rate. We still had plenty of time to eat and go through security, but changes like that on travel days are NOT welcome.
At 10pm, I said goodbye to my coleaders, and off we went through security.
The first flight from Lima to Bogota was running a little late. We started boarding about 45 minutes after the tickets said we would. No big deal, very normal in other countries. Once we took off, the squad passed right out for a 3 hour nap at 20,000 ft.
We landed in Bogota and immediately wandered to a nice, safe corner to promptly set up World Race camp, aka young adults sleeping on the floor trying to be out of the way. Everyone tucked themselves in for another couple hours of needed sleep.
After the nap, everyone was all content with Dunkin Donuts and Juan Valdez keeping us company in this really nice airport. Around 9am we checked a board and saw that our flight was at gate 37. The herd migrated down the hall to set up camp again at the gate.
I played cards with one of my racers. After we got bored we went for a short walk. Once back at our gate, I heard an announcement for a final boarding call for flight AV262 to Guatemala at gat 46C.
WHAT.
We were sitting at our gate, #37, there was no one boarding. Like the Lima flight, I assumed it was running late to board and we’d just wait till they started. There were still people all around us, I assumed the flight was smaller, maybe?
I ordered everyone to get up and go to the other gate. It was 12:03 when we started moving and our flight takeoff was at 12:05 (not boarding time, take off).
I made it to the gate a little winded a minute later, certain they’d let us on. In stressed spanish, I explained that we were a group of 33 for this flight. A counter attendant took my passport and ticket and let me go through.
But when she saw the size of the rest of us coming, something happened and she changed her mind and had me come back. Without much explanation, I heard her talk on the radio, asking someone to take all our bags off the plane.
I asked what was happening, and she said it was too late. We missed the flight. It had to leave.
Reality didn’t really sink in and I said “What?” a couple times. She us to step to the side. After 15 minutes she talked to us again. She told me there wasn’t another flight that day. My heart dropped into my toes. Plus, because they announced the gate change, there would be a cost to getting new tickets. She said it wasn’t the airlines fault we missed it.
I’ve never, ever missed a flight before. Logistics planning runs in my blood and that just doesn’t happen to me. The attendant explained we had to go to the second floor of the airport, through the airport, through customs like we were staying in Colombia to get new tickets.
For the next 30 minutes, I couldn’t control my anger. On a scale of 1-10, I was a level 14 mad at myself. I won’t say some of the things I said to myself out loud. How could this happen? The attendant said they announced the gate change (in spanish) multiple times. I speak spanish. How did I miss them all? Why didn’t I look at the gate screen more often? What was I going to do with 33 people in the airport tonight?
It took 2 hours, but 33 of Gap V got passport stamps into Colombia, and we made our way through the airport to the ticket area. Cami, my incredible team leader and copilot for this crisis, and I had the group sit in a big clump near a coffee shop wall while we went to a counter to start the arduous process of getting this mess figure out.
For the next 3 hours, I went back and forth talking with a ticketing counter and calling leadership at home in America. At first we thought the group could fly out tomorrow morning, for $100 per person. Not a big deal. Get all the emergency cash together and away we go.
False. Language barrier strikes again. She didn’t say that. It was $500 per person. Turns out the most cost effective thing to do would be wait till December 11th (it was 5pm on December 9th) to fly together direct to Guatemala – essentially taking the exact flight we missed that day.
It would cost $16,000 USD total.
It’s pretty rare that you can put a price tag on a mistake, but I could. My eyes would well up every half hour or so as I thought about how much I had disappointed leadership above me, and how avoidable I thought this mistake was. I’m not usually plagued by people pleasing, but give me an error like this made out of carelessness and there isn’t much worse I can imagine. I know I’m with 33 able bodied adults, and none of us checked the board again or really understood the rapid spanish announcements – but leadership is ultimately accountable, and I knew I could have done something to see that our gate was different.
I begged God at this point to wake me up from this nightmare. I’d give anything to wake up sweating in the Peruvian jungle from the worst travel nightmare ever. But I was still sitting there. Adventures in Missions has budgeting wizards on staff, but that much money isn’t “a little cushion”, it’s a whole king size mattress of money that had to come from somewhere. So I sat some more and waited to hear that money (from no where) would be loaded into my card to buy our new way to Guatemala. On top of the fight cost, I figured out we couldn’t sleep in the airport by their rules, so we started the hunt for a hostel nearby. Yay….more money spent on a mistake.
Throughout this whole day, the squad was absolutely WONDERFUL. They were flexible, didn’t complain, didn’t ask a lot of questions, and showered me in food, coffee and water as we figured this out. I was really grateful for them all day.
Around 5pm that I night (now at 12 hours in the airport) I went to the bathroom and came back to Cami and Kori, a logistics leader, talking to the ladies who had been sitting in the glass Avianca airlines tickets box all afternoon. They were out of their glass box, standing in the busy hallway.
Cami and Kori looked overjoyed….huh?
I walked up hesitantly and the Avianca attendant explained that they believed they could call their customer service line and say potentially that our flight was delayed and we could get our flights booked for less money or free. There was a lot more said that I couldn’t pick up, but she ended with a smile and a little gestures with her palms together pointed up by her chin, the universal sign for “let’s pray”.
I was stunned and a little confused. What changed? Why were they saying this now? We’d been talking for hours and its as clear we had to pay for these.
Apparently it hadn’t stuck with them that our gate was ever changed. Plus, something about the size of the group made them realize how unlikely it was for us to intentionally miss a flight because of the cost. I didn’t let myself believe this could be true. We told some racers sitting the ground with their bags to start praying. I began to tear up at the idea of this mistake getting cleared up for free.
For the 20th time that day I walked with the Avianca women to their glass ticket box. A black land line phone with its spiral cord was handed to me between a gap in the glass. She said “You will hear an English voice, and you need to say ‘my flight was delayed, I want to book a new one.” I said, “That’s it?” and they said “yes.”
Sure enough a voice in english on the other end of this magic call to the inner workings of Oz started talking to me. I said those magic words. She asked for booking reservation numbers, and in groups of 4-6 she started booking flights for December 10th and 11th. Half way through getting the numbers for flights, I asked “Ma’am….there’s no charge for these flights?” And she said quickly, “No… Whats your next reservation number?” My eyes welled up again.
After an hour on the phone it was done: 33 new flights, like nothing had happened.
To make the entire story more incredible, one of our racers had family in Bogota. So at 9pm the whole tribe grabbed all of our luggage, booked some taxi vans and went 15 minutes away to some friend of a friend of a relative’s home. There are incredible people in this world who at the drop of a hat, welcome 33 stranded young adults into their home. They had purchased chips, cookies, soda and coffee for us. They had Christmas decorations up. It felt like a party that was always planned, but we didn’t know we were invited to. The party didn’t last too long before we fell asleep on the floor, in the hallway and in some beds.
At 5pm that night I was sitting in the one of the most expensive mistakes I could ever for see making on the World Race, stranded in a foreign city with 33 people who’s attitudes were stellar, but I didn’t know how long that could last. At 11:58pm I got into a real bed, after a shower, in a home with 33 free tickets to get to Guatemala booked.
I could type for an eternity to say how awesome God showed himself to be in this situation.
Grace is receiving something you don’t deserve. I did NOT deserve free flights. We were careless and missed that flight.
The Avianca attendant felt like Jesus – this magic bridge to this forgiving higher power that heard my saddest moments and said, “here ya go. You don’t deserve it but you can have it anyway.” Grace.
All day I was in my head and angry, but my squad said, “we love you so much” and gave me gifts. Grace.
Like the prodigal son coming home to his dad, I wanted to suffer for this mistake, but there was an actual party waiting in Colombia for my people that didn’t do anything to deserve a party. Grace, again.
That’s a really, really long story. But it can me summed up this way: grace can turn any failure into joy, and sometimes Jesus wears an Avianca uniform.
________________________
I’m aware that I shared a story as we moved from Peru to Guatemala and I’ve shared absolutely nothing about Peru. I promise I will soon!
