Getting Here - Saturday, June 14, 2008

3:45 am. The line at the Continental Airlines counter is already dozens deep. Blue CURE International t-shirts pepper the crowd, personal luggage in tow, and a huge block of luggage tagged with bright green CURE International medical tags sits off to the side. Everyone is groggy but excited.

The one almost universal apprehension is whether our bags with personal items will come in under the 50-pound weight limit. It's tough to pack everything you need for two weeks into a 50-pound package. And no matter what your bathroom scale tells you, it's the airline's scale that counts. Mine comes in at 49. Ada McManus's is almost three pounds heavy, but the Continental Airlines rep is compassionate. He smiles and warns her not to pack so heavily on the way home.

The flight to Houston is full. My carry-on bag, crammed with photographic equipment, a laptop computer, and a day's worth of personal items (in case my checked bag gets lost in transit) is too fat to fit in the overhead. Lee Flinner comes to my rescue and lets me transfer toiletries, mosquito netting, and a change of clothes into his bag.

En route to Houston, after a hearty breakfast of Honey Nut Cheerios, milk and bananas, most of the team drifts off to sleep. I can't sleep, but I'm compensated with 1) views at 35,000 feet of the most glorious cloud formations I've ever seen from the air (sorry, no photos) and 2) the opportunity to get an interesting photo of the CURE Honduras team, heads flopped back or to the side, mouths open, snoring en masse. (Yes, photo attached -- maybe -- framed poster available.)

During our roughly fifty-minute layover in Houston, I notice that ours is not the only mission in the airport. At least three other mission groups, each headed to Central America and each sporting distinctive t-shirts, crowd the eateries and airport shops with us. I wonder if this has been going on around me for a long time and I've just never noticed before. A little personal experience can be eye opening.

Our flight from Houston is delayed more than an hour, most of which we spend parked on the runway at the end of a line of other aircraft waiting to take off. It is perhaps a hint that we should all start slowing down, letting go of expectations, and going with the flow -- all necessary skills where we're headed.

My first glimpse of Honduras from the air is of a muddy brown river snaking through plantations, villages and small patches of thick forest. Klaus Bergmann is in the window seat beside me. A photographer himself, he leans back to let me take a few photos, pointing out features that he's learned from many trips here are typical features.

It turns out that our experience on the Houston tarmac was a good exercise in patience. The San Pedro Sula airport is chaos in slow motion. An airliner accident at another Honduran airport a few weeks ago has led cautious authorities to route that airport's traffic here, so the crowd of arriving passengers is twice as heavy as normal. Which means that immigration processing takes twice as long. And in the small customs area, moving the mission's huge block of personal and medical luggage through the solitary x-ray machine and then through a manual inspection (slowed by a novice customs inspector) is like moving a logjam down a river of cold molasses.
Finally, though, everyone and everything is cleared, and the luggage is loaded on a truck by CURE's Honduran team.

Then we wait. We wait for team members arriving from other parts of the USA, wait for a portion of luggage that did not make it onto our flight from Houston, and wait for the two old school buses that will take us to San Marco, about two hours away. At the San Pedro Sula airport, there are really only two activities to occupy you while you wait. 1) exchange your U.S. dollars for Honduran l'empiras (18.5 to the dollar), using the services of one of the roving money exchangers who wander around with wads of l'empiras and small calculators to demonstrate that their conversion calculations are accurate, and 2) start spending your newfound wealth at the airport Wendy's.

A few burgers and frosties later, we're aboard the buses and heading to our new home for the next week or two. There's plenty of time to meet new mission companions. I talk for most of an hour to Jessica Matzkin. She's accompanying her parents, both in their early seventies and longtime CURE missionaries. Her father, Michael, is a prominent oral surgeon; her mother, Sara, is listed on the roster as a General Helper but is a lot more. Jessica, herself a veteran of missions and travels all over the world, has left her two-year-old and seven-month-old children ay home in the care of her supportive husband, a CNBC journalist. She is here, she says, to look after her folks, but she also admits that, for her, Central America is the richest spiritual region in the world. She talks of returning here to rebalance herself and be reminded of what's important. "It's really hard to be selfish here," she says.

I also meet Herman von Oy, a translator and former Peace Corps volunteer, who knows Honduras and its people well. He tells me about the extraordinary conversion and invaluable work of Tomás Ramirez, a largely uneducated local man who has become a leading community healthcare advocate and instructor. Herman also understands that a photographer, in addition to doing his assignment, is looking for dramatic local images, and he promises to arrange for me a local tour in one of the town's obsequious 3-wheeled taxis.

Before I know it, we're turning off the paved highway and turning down the dirt road into San Marco. We are home.