You Can’t Go

The week sped by.  Before we knew, it was Wednesday.  We started to hear back from doctors in America about Aubrey’s finger.  Yes, they would pin it.  We have a 10 day window before the bone would have to be re-broken.  Yes, it could impair fine motor movements such as playing the violin if we did not have it pinned properly. 

We were asked to come up with quotes from the hospitals in Jakarta (no easy feat) and compare them to the hospital in Malaysia.  This would validate leaving the country.  Thankfully Stephanie spent a full afternoon getting all the grunt work of pricing and airline ticket prices all lined up for us.  Often the phone number listed for a hospital on the web page was wrong.  I can’t imagine the frustration she went through.  However, when we returned from town, getting pictures for our visa’s, Stephanie had all the quotes nicely presented for Darron’s boss.  He immediately approved the trip to Malaysia.  Even with additional airfare costs, the surgery price is significantly lower in Malaysia and we knew the hospital was staffed with doctors who have studied abroad.  Many of the doctors here have only a four year degree.

So the second hurdle (or have we already jumped over 10?) was to get exit Visa’s and perhaps more importantly: reentry Visa’s.  Jan and Bob’s legal advisor agreed to try and declare an emergency for Aubrey and I to leave.  However, he did not sound hopeful as he questioned why our Visa’s were still all based out of Jakarta.  For some reason, we had not understood the importance of our paper work being based out of Papua and our legal advisor had not recognized this error either.  Nor did we know that we needed permission to leave.  Sleep came that night with the thoughts of if we should go then all of these details would come together.

Thursday morning when I awoke, I really began to contemplate the pending decision.  Aubrey’s pain was virtually gone.  Was it really a crises of enough situation to spend thousands of dollars, at least 5 days away from the family (with no instant meals to fall back on and Darron out of town), and face a foreign city alone with Aubrey?  Not even to mention the trauma of surgery and who would pull the pin x weeks later?!!!  Bob had talked to me about that we could look it up on the internet! : )  I think he was half way looking forward to it!!!! : )

By mid morning Aubrey and I zipped up to the hospital and had the finger x-rayed.  The bone has not appeared to have shifted from the first relocation.  Though it still does not look great (no radiology degree needed to diagnose this).  By the time we arrived home the local legal advisor had called to say “you can not go”.  His plea for our “emergency” did not work, due to us having the wrong papers.   At this point, both Aubrey and I had resigned that we would stay and believe that the end results would not be too frustrating.  We were told that we could declare an emergency in Jakarta, but that they may not let us reenter the country (I must confess that I was slightly tempted by this thought!).  HA!

The blessing in disguise to all of this finger story is that it brought to light our Visa story.  Had this not happened, we would still be in the dark about our Visa status.  In 7-8 weeks we are slated to leave the country for annual leave and what a mess we would have been in.  Hopefully, there is enough time to get all of the paper work sorted out before mid June.  I’m waiting for the words, “You can go”.

As always, thanks for reading and praying.  Where are you waiting to “go” to?