Lima Vision Conference Part 1

Last week I (John) had an opportunity to travel to Lima Peru for a Biblical World Vision conference with a group of 6 other Bolivians. It was a tremendous experience and I returned home with several good stories. Before I share about the conference itself let me first share about my experience at the airport. I was scheduled to leave the Sucre airport at 5:20pm on Tuesday evening. The flight was a direct flight from Sucre to Santa Cruz (Bolivia) where I would then spend the night and catch a very early morning 6:50am direct flight from Santa Cruz to Lima Peru. Jennie, Ella and I decided to relax for the morning before I left for the airport at 3:00pm by going to a local place to enjoy some fresh squeezed juice. While we were there I received an anxious phone call from FH saying that my flight had been rescheduled and would be leaving in 1 hour. I raced out of the restaurant (leaving my full glass of pineapple juice) ran 5 blocks up hill, grabbed my bags and hailed a taxi to the airport. When I got to the airport I soon found out that the flight had been totally canceled and that I would be rescheduled on a different flight 3 hours later, and going through La Paz. I decided to take a taxi back home and then return back to the airport 3 hours later. At the airport the second time I found out that the plane had been officially delayed for another hour and a half. However the hour and a half was soon 2 hours and a half. Once we did finally begin to load we entered a very small boarding area to wait for the plane to arrive and unload. The airline decided to expedite the process by having the passengers line up in order of their seats and isles. I can now speak from experience, but having 60 Bolivian people crammed in a small room line up by order of seats is not exactly an efficient process. Further more once we did get lined up the attendant then asked my row to begin walking in a line in the opposite direction in order to reverse our order. (Yes a diagram is needed to fully comprehend.) We then proceeded to wait another 20 minutes for the plane to arrive. By that time half the people were tired of standing and decided to sit down totally disintegrating our sense of order. After 20 minutes we left the boarding room and proceeded outside to the tarmac where we waited another ten minutes for the plane to totally unload. Finally we boarded the plane only to find a flight attendant standing at the door pointing to the seat where we would sit. Yes, taking into no account the actually seat that we were assigned or the strategic order that we had spent 30 minutes arranging. Finally we waited another 10 minutes on the plane. So basically all the effort to expedite the boarding process was futile as we ended up sitting in the plane waiting for the baggage to load. We did eventually end up leaving and I did get where I was supposed to go safely so I was thankful about that. You learn to not ask questions and just accept the fact that any attempt to understand the reasoning behind the strategy will always come back void. Of well, just a glimpse into travel in South America.