As many of you know, I have another role on my squad known as LOGISTICS Leader. My partner and I are responsible for getting the squad from point A to point B like moving from Thailand to Cambodia. This role, as you’ll see, has taught me MUCH about trusting God and depending on Him, but also seeing how much BIGGER He is than me and because of that how CAPABLE He is at providing for our squad!!!
Being month 8 I have become pretty comfortable with arranging our travel day transportation, lodging, etc. from one country/continent to the next. Our most recent travel days to Africa, however, proved much more difficult than any other!
Therefore, I thought it a great opportunity to reveal what
A day in the life of a logistics leader
looks like for THAT travel day….March 31st!
To set the scene, you must know that Adam, my former logistics partner, stepped down as logistics and LAURA FICKEN (lauraficken.theworldrace.org) is now my new partner!!! She is such a blessing and I’m grateful God has called her to join me the last 4 months for logistics.
Now on to the day….
Laura and I awake at the early time of 4:30am…You see as logistics we need to be up and EARLY on the travel day – as we are responsible for our squad! Plus we weren’t exactly sure where our transportation would be meeting us so we had to do a bit of searching to find out. After discovering our bus was on the street, the squad walked packs in all a short distance down a poorly light yet quiet street to the bus. Upon arriving we realized that the bus only has seats for 40 people…meaning more than a few of us having to stand for the hour we had to the airport – no big deal. We arrive at the airport with plenty of time before our flight takes off, 3.5 hours, or so I thought….
Ridiculous airport security….
Before we could even get into the airport we had to go through a security line outside in which we needed to produce our e-ticket or boarding pass, of which we had none. So the military guard, clearly upset and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of people and their luggage, had to send another guard inside to get a manifest list. I jumped to the front of the slow moving line to help match the racers passport name to that on the manifest. It suddenly occurred to me that I had on my phone the confirmation list and number for our flight. I pulled it out and showed it to the military guard. Still wanting to verify everyone in line was actually on the list, he allowed us to see this list and everyone was through in no time. Then once in the airport, we had to wait yet again in a line to acquire our boarding passes. This normally doesn’t take that long even with our large group of 50, but the airline decided to only have one machine printing boarding passes. At this point we’ve got about 2 hours until our flight and still need to get through security and for me I still need to exchange logistics India Rupees for USD. I finally locate the airline worker to see if we can’t speed the process up a bit…. to which he opened more lanes up for printing boarding passes. We make it to the security line after getting the money exchanged with about an hour and a ½ till we board. Security/customs was no problem and we eventually make it safely and on time to our gate….
I will say a highlight of the travel day was DEFINITELY flying Emirates (and no they did not pay me to plug them – HA). Wow – talk about feeling first class sitting in the back of the plane! The food, the entertainment (personal screens with tons of movies and more on it) and the personal were wonderful.
Our last leg of the flight, from Dubai to Johannesburg (yeah that’s right we had a very short layover in Dubai – saw the world’s tallest building, NBD) was delayed a bit which didn’t help with us connecting with our transportation at the Joburg airport. The plan was to arrive at the Joburg airport, acquire a SIM card to call the bus driver so he could come pick up us up, and then pull at Rand (South African currency) to pay him. With the flight delay, none of the SIM card stores nor money exchange places were open. I reverted then to my international SIM card which also wasn’t working….so after pulling at the necessary funds from the one working ATM at the airport, I walked across the street to the Intercontinental Hotel to see if I couldn’t locate our transportation. I asked the front desk guy to borrow a phone to call a local number, the bus driver. He was more than willing to help, mind you it’s 11pm, and actually explained to the bus driver where we were located. The driver said he was on his way and I thanked the hotel worker for his help. The bus came about 20 minutes later to take us to our hostel….
No reservations?!
It took us about 20 minutes to get to our hostel. When we pulled up we noticed that the gate was closed and no one had waited up to let us in. It looked deserted. We were late but not that late…after scrambling to find the phone number of the manager and finding an international SIM card that worked, we finally connected with someone from the hostel. Not only was this person at their home but they were also sleeping when we called. We quickly learned that our reservations had been canceled because they had not received our electronic deposit…oh boy – here we are at midnight in Joburg with 50 people in need of SLEEP! I explained best I could that we were not aware that the deposit didn’t go through but were still in need of lodging for the night – could she help us? Long story short – she drove over with her partner, looked at the hostel room schedule and was able to find all 50 of us a bed for the night at 1:15am – amen! Not only did they find us beds but made arrangements for us to have our breakfast too!
So we’ve made it to South Africa, but our squad needs to be in Swaziland. . . and so logistics continues to on with our travel day!!
April 1st… no fools here!
Laura and I, knowing we still needed to buy SIM cards and get wifi to confirm our transportation to Swaziland later that day made a plan for meeting up in the morning and heading to the local mall. After a good but short nights rest, Laura and I use the hostel’s car service to head to the mall. We arrived at the mall expecting to find a coffee shop or restaurant that we could sit, get wifi, and get going with our business…we learned, however, that only one place at the mall offered wifi – the local Wimpy’s restaurant.
But to use the wifi you have to SMS with a phone to acquire the passcode. So we set out to buy our SIM cards. We get our SIM cards, load the airtime on them and head back to Wimpy’s only to find out that my SIM card doesn’t work – I can text but can’t call local numbers. AH! So after our 30 minutes of free wifi at Wimpy’s we go back to the SIM card store to see what the problem with my SIM card is….after several phone calls from the store manager, we learned that it takes 8 hours before my SIM card can work….WHAT?! That’s ridiculous. So fortunately the store manager gives me another SIM card for free and I load more airtime on it to finally have it working!
No ATM card?!
We decide then that we should pull more money out for paying for our transportation to Swazi, which we’d learned would pick us up at the hostel around 2-3pm. When I go to withdraw money I realize that I don’t have my ATM card….AHAHAHAH! We figured I must have left it in the ATM at the airport in the hustle of figuring out the transportation situation. So once we make it back to the hostel, I use my international SIM card to call VISA to report my card lost….fortunately this didn’t take that long and I was able to have a new card sent to the AIM office in Georgia (PTL).
We got an extra pizza, but were short a van!
While all this was happening, Laura and I realized we probably should order pizza for our squad as many were hungry and breakfast was a few hours ago…so the hostel staff helped place the order and have it delivered. In the mean time Laura and I are still trying to narrow down when the buses are arriving. Finally at 4pm 2 – 22 passenger vans show up to drive us to Swazi. Problem is we asked for 3 vans, not two because of our numbers and luggage. So we waited another ½ hour for the third van, loaded up, and headed to Swazi.
Our trip there took us about 6 hours with several food/potty stops and a border crossing (fortunately this was uneventful!!). We arrive at the AIM base in Manzini around 10:30-11pm and meet our contact Xolani. He quickly explained what needed to happen and we headed off to our homesteads, where we would be sleeping for the month. I arrived at our homestead around midnight only to realize that I had not paid the driver yet….fortunately he hadn’t left yet but told me I couldn’t pay him – I had to pay the other driver who was in charge. So we drove a short distance (a teammate came with me too) to meet up with the other driver, paid him the money, and then were driven back. Sigh…..
And that’s how we made it to Africa! Praise the Lord!
Thankfully,
Lauren
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P.S. I still LOVE being logistics!!
