By Eleane, January 14, 2015
One of the best days of my life so far was the day I was finally evacuated from the war-torn Congo (DRC). It was like one of those hairy scenes from a movie that lasted almost a week. First, we had purchased two tickets but couldn’t use them. One airline would not even sell us tickets. You see, my roommate, her daughter, and I did not have our actual passports in hand. We had just “DSLed” our passports to Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the day before in order to get our resident stamp put on them when the war broke out. This made it almost impossible for us to purchase an international plane ticket.
Since we were in the middle of the country and did not want to fly into Kinshasa, we decided to try another route. Kinshasa was the place where our superiors were located and where the U.N. flights were leaving from, but it was also the place where the war broke out in the first place–at the airport, mind you. Flights were being stopped going east and west in order to try to control the troops’ movements, so we had no other way to go but south; however, the fact that the airlines could not legally sell an international ticket to someone, knowing they didn’t have the proper documents for entry, made it difficult, if not almost impossible to purchase a ticket.
But–God!–there are many factors that led to our finally purchasing tickets to board a plane to South Africa. My belief is that God was the greatest factor! It was the last plane leaving Luncanbashi in the Congo, the southernmost city in the Country; and it was chaotic, a race between the “haves” and the “have-nots.“ We little missionaries were caught in between. We had the means, but not the contacts. I remember the original flight was on a Monday at 8:00 in the morning, which meant we had to drive in the dark early in the morning to get to the airport, only to find that the flight had been cancelled. However, at night there were roadblocks, and our truck ended up hitting the 2-by-4s held up by two bricks on either side of the road. We startled our twelve- or thirteen-year- old soldier, who was awakened by the loud noise. He jumped up with a rifle in his hand pointing at us. So I really thought that was way too much,considering we didn’t get on a plane that day.
About three days later, we had tickets in hand and got to the airport early at 5:00 for an 8:00 p.m. flight. However you could see business owners paying bribe money to airport personnel to ensure seats on the flight. Having tried to purchase tickets for weeks, we finally found out that if we just paid the tariff of one thousand dollars per person, the airlines would let us get the tickets. However, the flight was delayed for two hours. A customs officer rifled through our belongings. Later, an announcement was made that we could go back in town for dinner. But afraid to lose our place, we stayed there at the gate until we boarded the plane at 11:00 p.m., bound for Johannesburg, South Africa.