To begin to explain the craziness of May, we really have to preface the month by explaining what happened a few months earlier as we were planning our trip back to the US. We knew we were going to have a LOT of luggage. We also knew that American Airlines (the only US airline that flies to Bolivia) just reduced their baggage allowance to only one bag per person, with the second back being $70. With this in mind, we were going to fly on Aerosur Airlines, a Bolivian airline and the only other airline besides American Airlines that flights nonstop to the US. They just started flying into Washington, DC, which was perfect for us, because we could fly Southwest from there to Columbus and avoid any kind of luggage fee. When we went to purchase our Aerosur tickets in March, we found out that just the day before Aerosur had suspended all their international flights. It was the beginning of a huge mess, including bankruptcy, which the airline was and is going through. It's a long tale of corruption and government involvement that I won't get into in this blog, but basically...it really fouled up our plans. Eventually we would find out that we couldn't even fly Aerosur domestically, which in and of itself opened up it's own can of worms. We were left with 2 options. Either the expensive American Airlines ticket or another South American carrier that would stop for a layover somewhere in South America. We decided to try COPA airlines which stopped in Panama City and eventually continued on to Orlando, FL. The flight was super cheap, which was wonderful, but there was one big downside...the flight left at 2:30am in the morning!
By the time May arrived we had most of the departure details figured out, now it was time to sell our stuff! And boy did we have stuff to sell. We moved to Bolivia with just 6 big duffle bags and 3 small carry-on bags. Months later we moved into an apartment that had NO furnishings...not even appliances. We had to purchase all those things on our own, so now it was time to sell them. We made a list of all the things we had for sale and started to circulate them around to everyone we knew. (Craigslist hasn't made it to Sucre yet!) Much to our surprise, we had a LOT of interest in our things and sold most of the major items by the end of April. To sell the rest of our things we decided to have a garage sale, despite the horror stories we had heard from other missionaries. We thought the best way to avoid many of the problems others had was to be super organized. So we worked for several weeks, pricing everything and groupings like items together. The hardest part of the garage sale was doing all of this with 2 children underfoot. Anything we wanted to put out for the sale would quickly be undone by our 1 year old. And our 5 year old was not happy to keep finding price tags on her toys! We really couldn't set anything out until the night of the sale. We were up until nearly 2am getting everything ready, but everything went really well during the day of the sale, and we were able to sell most of our things.
Once we sold the things we weren't taking with us, the next task was packing up everything we were taking with us. We couldn't fit everything into our suitcases, and ended up packing up 7 boxes to ship. We took a couple of weeks to carefully pack the boxes, trying to select items that took up space yet weren't very heavy. We were happy to finally seal up the boxes and take them, via taxi, to the post office.
You may have looked ahead at the picture below to see open boxes. No, we did not put the pictures out of order. When we arrived to the post office we found out, much to our dismay, that the process for shipping boxes to the US had changed. We were going to have to use boxes issued by the post office, and each and every item would have to be individually weighted on a little tiny scale. UGGGG. So our 20 minute trip to the post office to drop off our boxes turned into a 3 hour ordeal.
With all the crazy details of physically moving we also had a lot of goodbyes to go through. John was doing one last staff training before leaving, and before his training session the office surprised him with a 15 min time of appreciation and farewell.
While our days were full, we tried to make sure we took time to have a few last visits to our favorite places and last dinners with friends. It was especially important for us that Ella have good good-byes with her friends. She had spent more of her life in Bolivia than in the US, and it had really become home to her. She is doing a lot of blogging about her experience that you can read about on her blog if you are interested.
