We will be posting a day by day description of our Alpharetta Team's journey to Paraguay.
Day 1: Departure Day
Our Team gathered at the church parking lot at 3 pm Friday. We had a few stragglers that showed up late but we finally got all 22 bags loaded on the bus, each at maximum weight plus one that was 20+ pounds overweight. We gathered for a send off prayer and were bid farewell by fellow church members and family of our team.
We pulled out of the parking lot at 3:35 Friday afternoon in heavy traffic headed for the airport. We arrived at 5:15. The international check in station was not too crowded and all went smooth. They even let us slide on the one overweight bag.
Security check took about 35 minutes and went without incident. We arrived at the gate at about 6:30 for our 8:30 flight. There was an On The Border restaurant in the gate area so the team sat down and had a final meal of really good Mexican Food.
We boarded our flight at 8:15 and were on our way. Our flight arrived in Sao Paulo, Brazil on schedule the next morning. When we got off the flight we were informed that the connecting airline had already closed out the flight and that we were going have to try and make the next flight 2 hours later…but it was overbooked so more than likely we would have to wait until the 10 pm flight that night.
Well, we were not to happy about that, so as nicely as possible we started working up the chain of command to get us on the flight. We did have confirmed tickets. The first level supervisor finally agreed to allow 6 out of the 11 on our team to get on that flight. So we choose the Team members to go and the remaining 5 of us continued talking to the supervisor. She told us we would just have to wait and see if we could get on the next overbooked flight and then she took off.
We felt like we were being ignored and were sure we would not make the flight. We knew our only hope was to go straight to the top. So the five of us gathered and said a short prayer asking Our Lord to please help us out and get the whole team on the flight. The Team arriving in Paraguay on different flights really presented a gigantic logistics problem for our hosts because we were staying 200 kilometers Northeast of Asuncion.
Just moments after our prayer the supervisor came running back to us and said hurry, follow me and we will get you on the flight. Our prayers were answered. God had plans for this Team.
More to follow in our Day 2 Update...
Mike & Melody Vanderhoff
