Wednesday April 20th 2011 marks the longest, most frustrating day of my life…
With not much sleep from the night before, I awoke at 4:00am and at 4:30 my friend Megan (ironically, she was also going home to visit) and I got in a taxi from Princess’ house to the airport. Our flight was scheduled at 7:57am to JFK. We were full of nerves and excitement! 8 volunteers from GUY 21 were also on the flight as they were heading home for good. My thinking prior to the flight, “everything will be okay because there’s 10 of us volunteers”. Boy was I WONG! Either Guyana didn’t want the 21ers to leave or Guyana really has it out for me.
4:30am
We boarded the plane and settled into our seats. We were ready! When a man, who was asked to move his seat twice grabbed a flight attendant on the shoulder and the flight attendant started freaking out saying, “sir, do not touch me or you will be kicked off the plane”. After that we were ready…but we sat without moving for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes until finally we heard over the PA, “sorry for the delay, we are having difficulties closing the back door”. What the heck?
After waiting over an hour on the door situation the captain announced, “we’ve fixed the door but we’ve now seemed to encounter a warning up in the cock pit. We hope to have it taken care of in no time”. By this time I heard a lot of laughing (coming for us PCVs, we should have expected this) and shucksing form the Guyanese. For me personally, I was praying to get home. One flight attendant kept saying, “they are trying their best to fix the problem but we might have to cancel the flight” Now, keep in mind Guyana is a small country and planes don’t come in every few hours or even every day. And the next flight would have been Friday morning.
After 3 hours of sitting and waiting on the plane, which people knew they were going to miss their connecting flights but my flight to SLC wasn’t until 8pm so I wasn’t too worried, yet. The captain again announced that they knew what the problem was but it would require us to fly at a lower altitude. The lady sitting next to me started yelling, “let us off the plane then”, the flight attendant told her the captain couldn’t hear her but she would go tell him. Then 2 guys came saying, “we can escort you off the plane” this made her madder. She kept saying it wasn’t safe to fly with a plane that couldn’t fix a problem in a timely manner.
Next the captain said everyone needed to disembark the aircraft and 50 people needed to voluntarily stay behind and take the flight on Friday. By this point tears started building up and I said, “I just want to go home”. Once off the plane I was so frustrated I just didn’t understand why this was happening? Why is EVERYTHNG so difficult here? We waited off the plane for 45 minutes then it was okay to re-board.
So we settled back into our seats with 50 less passengers when all of a sudden an elderly lady started roaming the aisle looking for her brown bag. The lady sitting in front of me said she had Alzheimer but the flight attendant said she had to be seated before we could leave. She wasn’t cooperating so her and the woman in front of me got off the plane.
By this point it was 12:15 and luckily we were in the air by 1:00pm due to arrive in JFK at 7:00, leaving me an hour to make my connecting flight.
But unfortunately, we didn’t reach the gate until 7:30pm and I knew there was no way I was making my connecting flight.
Once through immigration there were a few Delta employees waiting for us with re-scheduled flights for the next morning, which was very nice. Out of the 10 of us volunteers 2 made their connecting flights that night while the rest of us stayed in a hotel, courtesy of Delta.
After we collected all of our bags we made the trek to the tram and once outside we were pleasantly welcomed by the cold. Before this point it didn’t really click that I was “home”, it was so weird to look around and see so many different people.
We finally got to the hotel at 10pm. Meg and I shared a room and it was so nice! As I was taking a very hot shower I thought to myself, “what am I doing with my life?”
Meg and I got some food (a Caesar salad), also courtesy of Delta and called it a night.
10:00pm JFK
What seemed like 5 minutes of sleep at 3:50am I awoke to my alarm, time to get up and tackle the second leg of my journey home. I did run into 2 minor situations (not being able to print my boarding pass at the kiosk and having to discard my 2 bottles of rum at security) but that was nothing compared to the day before. Once at the gate Meg, Mica (a 21er), and I enjoyed some Starbucks and talked about how weird it was to be thrown back into the fast pace of life. I was intrigued by the iPads stations every few feet on the tables and by a large group of materialistic teenagers.
Mica & Meg & an iPad
Thankfully that flight was smooth sailing and I arrived in SLC just after 10am on Thursday April 21st. It was so good to see mom, Dan, and Isaiah waiting for me!
I couldn’t believe the ordeal to get home but it’s been so good being home and being with friends and family. And it was all worth it to finally meet baby Reggie! The moment I held him in my arms my heart filled with so much love and joy!
I just love him!
