Flight Info: 3:05pm leaving Manila for Hyderabad, India
So our “plan” was to leave Kids International Ministry at 10am, simply go to the airport, check in and wait for our flight…. Sounds pretty simple, right?
Well it didn’t work out like that – WE DIDN’T HAVE OUR INDIA VISAS YET!
Kelsey, Jon, and myself (my co-squad leaders) started working on getting the India visas when we got to the Philippines. Usually it’s a really easy process – We hand them off, send them off to the embassy, they return our passports with the visa inside and we’re done.
The 30th rolled around and we didn’t have our visas… and then the 31st happened and we still didn’t have them…. OUR FLIGHT IS TOMORROW!
Jeff, our ministry contact at KIM, told us not worry, that this was normal in the Filipino culture. So on the 1st, the bus showed up like planned. We waited until 11:30am and when we didn’t receive any word about the visas, we decided to load the bus up and go to the airport anyway.
Amy and Ben, our wonderful Logistics Coordinators, let Malaysian airlines know about situation. They let us use a copy of our passports, let us check our bags, and printed us tickets from Manila to Kuala Lampur.
Jeff arranged for a motorbike to drive the visas from the embassy to the airport the minute they were handed off. At 2:30pm, the passports finally arrived at the airport. Jon came running to the rescue, through the airport and straight to the ticket desk. He handed the lady all of our passports and she printed out all of our tickets from Kuala Lampur, Malaysia to Hyderabad, India.
We booked it through customs and security and made it to our gate by 3:15ish. It was all very Home Aloneish.
This all sounds like we were stressing out and anxious but we really weren’t. We knew that if God wanted us in India, we would get there and if He didn’t, we would stay in the Philippines or end up somewhere else – maybe Malaysia?
God has something special for us in India. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been so hard to get into the country. So my prayer for our time in India and my prayer for I-Squad and myself is that we’ll become completely selfless, living solely for God’s plan, and relying completely on Him. That we’ll give up on our own agendas and instead serve our teammates and the people we meet. That our time would no longer be our time but God’s time. That we would all know that God has something really, really GREAT for us and we would choose to move on from our past and start living in the GREATNESS He’s calling us into.
P.S. I still need $1,400 by the end of February to continue on the World Race. If you would like to support me, click on the “Support Me” tab. Thanks!
