A Hard Trip Home for Hope

It has been a long 72 hours or more since we left China. We are home, but Hope is sick and we are with her in the hospital. We brought her in on Sunday afternoon after calling Bro. Tim from our church who is Hope's pediatrician. He had her admitted directly to a room, and she is receiving fluids IV. She has pneumonia in her right lung, slight ear infections, and has had diarrhea. Here is a synopsis of what has transpired since our last post.

On Fri. morning at 6 Am China time we had our luggage in the hall of the White Swan and we went to eat breakfast at 6:30. We checked out at about 6:50 and got on the bus to the Guangzhou airport at 7:00 with about 12 other families. I tried to take in all of the scenes of China on that bus ride, knowing that I will probably not be back again. It was a little bit sad, thinking that 10 years from now, I will probably remember more about China than Hope. Our guides, Jason and Kathy did a great job, making sure that we had all of our documents for customs and immigrations. We got off on schedule and landed in Hong Kong at about 10:40.

Our flight to San Francisco was supposed to depart at 12:40, but we were informed that it was delayed until around 4:30 PM. We immediately started trying to phone home but found that our calling cards would not work in the airport's payphones. Another family loaned me their card and it wouldn't work either. I called the airport help desk and they told me that I would have to buy a calling card from the airport, that only theirs would work. I went to a currency exchange booth and found out that a calling card cost 50 dollars American. In the process of trying pay phones I had noticed an internet kiosk with six laptops available. We decided to send E-mail to the kids about the delay since it was about noon in Hong Kong, it would be before daylight back in Texas.

We sent three different E-mails figuring that at least one would be read before the family back home started out to DFW.

We had a free lunch on United Airlines due to their delay, and finally about 2 PM they posted the departing time and gate for our flight to San Francisco. We went to the gate and waited. We noticed that Hope would not each well at lunch, but figured it was the stress. We boarded the plane at about 4 PM. We were leaving four hours late and were told that there would not be a connecting flight from San Francisco to DFW until 24 hours after our original time of 10:40 Friday, PST.