The Journey

Getting to Manila was about as difficult as getting home from Mexico in '01 (Nick knows what I mean....). Due to circumstances of the insane kind, we managed to miss the cutoff for our flight by 2 minutes in Charleston. This meant that we missed ALL of our flights. So we got another flight to Charlotte later in the day. Then from Pheonix we went to San Francisco. Then we had to stop and spend the night there.

We caught a transPacific flight the next day which got us to Hong Kong 14 hours or so later. But the Philippines Airlines wouldn't let us on the plane. We were booked correctly, but they refused to check the notes section of our files and since we didn't have a paper ticket they wouldn't let us aboard. (They wanted to charge us $1800 per person for the 2 hour flight from Hong Kong to Manila.)

So we spent the night in Hong Kong and traveled to Manila today. It's all good, though. We're fine, and we had a great adventure. But the journey itself was a bit frustrating (at least for me, since I was the guy on site and trying to negotiate through all these barriers - the students responded wonderfully).

Manila is great. Very warm and humid. Tomorrow we're going to be at a feeding program and teaching people in the area how to build water filters. Tomorrow night is a concert and we'll be participating in leading parts of it (not me, of course, but some of the more musically talented people in the group). Jet lag has hit some of them harder than others, too. But they should be fine by 6:45am, when we have to leave to the outreach.

If there's a lesson anywhere in this, maybe it's just that the small things in life can create huge difficulties. We were only 2 minutes late, 120 seconds. Not a big deal, until it becomes a big deal. It's important for us in life to stay on top of things, even the little things, so that they don't become a big deal later on.