A Disappointing Day

Well... we are back at the children's home tonight. We left this morning at 2 am for the bus station in Guatemala City. At 3 am, we arrived at the station, the agent checked our passports and we boarded the bus and were off on the trip to Costa Rica.

Two hours later, we reached the boarder of El Salvador and had to show our passports to the border patrol. Let me preface this by stating that Daniel and my visas are in process right now. We received a stamp in our passports when we came to Guatemala in August and it was valid for 90 days. It expired in November but the lawyer for the children's home gave us a paper from the Migration Office saying that our visas were in process and she said that it would be fine for us to travel with that. I am sure that you can tell where this story is heading...

The Guatemalan agent looked at the paper from the Migration Office and told us that it was worthless and that we could not leave the country. Our director talked with him and finally he told us that we could go on through but that the agent in El Salvador would stop us. We proceeded about 15 feet by bus. We got our hopes up because we thought once we made it out of Guatemala, no other countries would care about our Guatemala stamp as long as our US passports were valid.

Unfortunately, while the agent seemed to only look at the front page of the passports for the other passengers, she looked at our stamps and said we couldn't be allowed to enter the country since our Guatemala stamps had expired. We showed her the papers from the Migration Office but she said the same thing as the first agent, that they were worthless and nothing could be done. We would have to return to Guatemala.

The bus driver told us that another bus would be coming by in an hour and we could ride it back to Guatemala City. It was a pretty sad moment when the bus driver handed us our luggage and we watched the rest of our group drive away on the bus. After only a few hours sleep and that big disappointment, I couldn't hold back my tears. I am sure we were a pretty pitiful sight, standing there holding our luggage looking confused and lost and me crying. A man selling food from a little stand came over and handed me two napkins.

We passed the hour in the migration tent on the side of the road surrounded by a group of rather shady men trying to talk us into changing our money with them to the local currency. It was an interesting experience. Finally, we boarded the bus back to Guatemala City. We were a little nervous when an El Salvador agent boarded the bus to inspect passports. We didn't recognize him but I guess we had become notorious because when he reached us, he said "bye" in English and waved at us.

We then stopped at the Guatemalan border and once again were a little nervous when we saw that it was now a different agent than the one that let us through the first time. I was afraid that we would get trapped in El Salvador and not be permitted to re-enter Guatemala. Fortunately, we when approached the desk, he said that their system was down and waved us through, not even looking at our passports.

We made it back to the bus station in Guatemala City without incident. While we are extremely disappointed and still a little sad, we trust that there is some reason that we were not supposed to go on this trip and thank God for His protection in getting us back safely to the children's home.

Please pray for the rest of the team as they continue on to the conference. We will spend this week at NLCH and return to language school next Sunday.