Admittedly, I am far from an expert at being a team leader. I am good at scrounging medications, and ordering supplies, and keeping dossiers about which company has been the most generous to AHMEN. I can tell you when the next surplus medical equipment will be up for grabs and who to talk to about it. I roll up my sleeves and try to do everything I can do. These things I can do.
Planning and being a leader for this team has been a challenge. The duration of the trip made the pool of missioners smaller than the usual AHMEN crowd. When it became obvious that we needed a few more healthcare professionals with us, I turned to UMVIM. They sent out an email all-points-bulletin. In just a few hours, my phone was rarely silent. Much to the dismay of my employer, I'd given only my phone number for replies. (Note to self: No phone numbers.... just email address for replies. This will at least not make it painfully obvious that your are doing something other than your job while on the clock.)
Soon, I had the converse of my earlier problem. Instead of a shortage of people for the La Moskitia team, now I had to make choices from too many qualified applicants. Essentially everyone who responded to the UMVIM priority email would have fit into any medical team, and would have done a super job. Almost everyone had extensive mission field experience. Applicants were from as far away as Colorado, even one from Kenya. The difficult choices were made and the core of our medical team was established. The final team comes from five different States, as well as Honduras and Cuba.
I tip my hat to Lou Altman, who handles all the insurance and background checks for the teams I've been on. Who knew the quagmire that awaited me with this? A combination of AHMEN and CHIMES members, members of churches all over the country, and three different countries to boot. So, at this point, that's all done, and I am starting to feel at least a little in control and less like someone is sitting up there throwing curve balls at me with both hands and watching how silly I look trying to at least make contact once in a while.
The den in my basement looks like a combination of the back room of a mega pharmacy and a thrift store. (It always looks like a thrift store... but worse now.) I have been squirreling away medication for months. Each order for additional medications we make for the mission trip ends up there. Up until six weeks ago I had the largest collection of donated ostomy supplies in the free world! Now that will fill up a room quickly, and I didn't even order it.
Slowly the folly of my ways began to creep into my softening brain. It was the guy with the curve balls again waiting for me to realize what was about to happen. Here I was, with thousands of dollars of needed medications in my basement and only one other team member from Alabama. How are we going to get this stuff to Honduras? And then, a flicker of light twinkled at the far end of the tunnel! Simple!, I thought. I'll just load it on the Spring container! We had plenty of time for it to get there, and we could pick it up upon our arrival in La Ceiba from the Cruzadas warehouse. Easy! All I had to do was to pack it and label it and haul it to the Disaster Warehouse in Decatur.
But then the events centering around the delays of the Christmas container surfaced and the low level nausea came to sit upon me once again, and more curve balls were seen whizzing by my head. I couldn't take the chance that the medications we needed for the clinics and the supplies for Ciriboya would end up in Customs Limbo on some dock in the backwaters of La Ceiba. So all the medicine was unpacked and only the non-essential stuff was put on the container.
The basement looks like it did again. We now had all this medicine to get to Honduras and not a good way to do it. We toyed with the idea of parsing out the meds and sending portions to each team member. Have you any idea what it costs to ship a 50 pound box to California, or just over the hill to South Carolina. The easiest thing to do, and almost the cheapest, was to bite the bullet and take it all as extra baggage on the plane to Honduras.
The light still flickered at the end of the tunnel. Tom Arnold and I split up the medication and prepared ourselves for the inevitable writing of the checks. All seemed at least quiet and calm. You find yourself mentally doing next years taxes in the false belief that you will come out ahead. In the immortal words of Rose Anne Rozanadana, "There's always somethin'......"
Yesterday, being a dedicated, organized and fairly O.C. team leader, I called Continental Airlines to reconfirm baggage policy for international flights. In one nanosecond..... (that is, after a 30 minute hold on the phone.....) the flicker of light at the end of the tunnel turned into a speeding freight train so close I could smell it. The sweet, but bored lady somewhere in some faraway land spoke the word that I had heard about, but had never seen in real life. The word never spoken out loud, but whispered only by the arthritic and bearded silverbacks of mission-dom. A word more unsettling and frightening than "audit" or "cancelled".
She said the word with a certain abandon and intonation that, in retrospect, I knew that I was on speaker phone at her office and the entire room was listening for my reply. She said it, and waited, through the eternity it took for my numbing brain and welling nausea to grasp, for me to reply.
She had said "Embargo"
Yes, sir, there is an embargo (she said it again) until the 27th of April she lilted in what might have been a Bangladeshi brogue . All passengers may only check two pieces of luggage into Honduras. Well, we don't notify you of this when it occurs after you buy your tickets because it's more fun not to. Actually I did ask that question, but that is the answer I am sure she wanted to say instead of the audible mumble I never quite heard.
Good Grief!! Tic, Tic, Tic........
I'll post more when I figure out what to do.
This is your best post yet.
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