Just Call Me Jason Bourne
The day started out like any other normal day. I hung out with my barber friend in the morning and headed to the bakery for some lunch. While I was enjoying a tasty tomato, cheese, and pepper sandwich my phone rang. It was Mr. K, another team guy.
Me - "Hey."
Mr. K - "Hey, you've got 30 minutes to pack a bag and get to my house. We're headed out."
Me - "...Ok."
I finished lunch, threw a bag together, and headed over to the K house to find out what was going on. There's a guy with our company who works with volunteers from the States who come over for a week or two to help out. Apparently, he was leading a group around when he fell, broke his leg, and got flown out of the city, leaving the volunteers alone in the middle of a foreign country with no clue how to get anywhere or talk to anybody.
When a crisis like this breaks out, when the normal solutions don't work, when lives are on the line, who does the company turn to? Who do they call? Apparently, they call me.
Mr. K and I drove to the city where the volunteers were last known to be. After 4 hours of driving to the city and another hour or so of driving around the city looking for these guys, we finally found them at a hospital. They were overjoyed to see us, and after getting some supper we headed out.
Remember the guy with the broken leg? Before he broke his leg, he was hauling these guys around in a giant Ford Transit van. With no one else qualified to drive the big rig, I took the keys and the driver's seat. The good news was that the volunteers had an itinerary with reservations already made at hotels. The bad news was the only guy who knew where these hotels were was thousands of kilometers away getting his leg worked on. So, with nothing but a name of a hotel and a name of a city, we set out.
As you can imagine, driving around giant vans in this country is a cross between fun excitement and "Wow, we almost died" excitement.
After finding the city, and driving around for like an hour and a half trying to find the hotel, we finally got to bed that night around 2 in the morning. The next day Mr. K headed back home in his van, and me and the volunteers continued on our trek. We stopped and toured around an old church site and then spent the next 12 hours (I'm not kidding) on the road. We went clear to the Big Apple, the biggest city this country has to offer. After 12 hours of "Wow, we almost died" excitement on the road, I was more than ready to park the van and go to bed. But, as it would turn out, reaching the city was the easy part.
Imagine you're in the biggest city in the country, a metropolis of maze-like streets and alleys, trying to find a single hotel, at 12:00 midnight no less. All you know about this hotel is its name. Don't worry, there's only 15 billion hotels in the city. Fortunately, the volunteers (somehow) knew what part of the city it was in. After getting to the right part of the city, we took back alley after back alley, one-way street after one-way street, eventually going around in circles until we finally found our little hotel. I parked the van, helped the volunteers get all their stuff in the hotel, and breathed a sigh of relief that lasted about 10 minutes. Then I went and ate at McDonald's at 2 in the morning. (The big city's not all bad.)
The best part of it all was handing the Transit keys and the volunteers off to the point man in the big city. The volunteers were all alive and accounted for, and the van had nary a scratch. Mission Accomplished. I hopped on a bus headed home, looking forward to spending some time in my city, at least until the next crisis...
P.S. The guy that broke his leg is doing better. He's at home with his family, and he can kind of walk around.
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