We sat on the tarmac for over 4 hours with no food or water, courtesy of Austrian Airlines. Apparently Dulles had been closed down and JFK was too busy to let us park anywhere. Sitting there was excruciating; there was even a crying baby and a small barking dog on board (poor little guys). When we finally got inside the building around 7:30 pm, I discovered that one of my checked bags hadn�t made it. I stood disbelieving at the conveyor until the end, and watched the bags go around and around, none of them my old floral suitcase from high school. I fought back tears as I tried to explain to a number of different airport staff that half of everything I owned was in that missing bag.
I was simply told to talk to someone else, who told me to talk to someone else, who finally advised me that since Dulles was the final destination that I would have to talk to someone there...I felt as though I would never get there, though. I then proceeded to stand in line with everyone else from the flight for an elevator to get upstairs to customer service which alone took nearly a half an hour, believe it or not. Some people had been traveling from Africa and India, and were more exhausted even than me. The airport was packed, and crazy. Everywhere, people looking dirty and exhausted stood or sat with bags and boxes and tubes and food.
Everyone from the flight was all at the Austrian Airlines counter until nearly 10:30 pm, trying to get flights out of JFK for Dulles, or reroute their trips. I thought I was in the shortest line, but although I was less than 15 feet from the counter, it was somehow never my turn. I had remembered America as a place of fairness and order, but it just seemed like madness, disorganization and line-cutting.
I was starving, had been without a toilet for hours and so ill I almost fainted dead on the floor, and of course, I was totally alone. Trying to monitor my bags, get the hell out of NY, and not being able to use the bathroom for three hours (let alone my requisite every 15-20 minutes) finally became too much physically and emotionally. I looked down at the floor and saw a puddle of blood and that my pant legs were bloody. I imagined my turquoise and purple couch in my empty apartment in Pehcevo, just beginning to fill with summer�s morning light and me half a world away from it, and I just wanted to walk to it, lay down, and forget everything. But it was too far away, and I couldn�t walk. The room started to spin and I sat down abruptly on my remaining blue suitcase. I began to weep loudly (and very genuinely, I might add) and a man behind me became alarmed and got the attention of someone at the Austrian Airlines counter.
The airline offered me a flight to Dulles out of JFK the next night, and, still in tears, I whipped out my travel authorization from the U.S. Government and said �I am a Peace Corps Volunteer on a medical evacuation! I was supposed to be under a doctor�s care this evening! I need to get to D.C. first thing in the morning!�
The guy had no clue what I was talking about, but he got me an early morning flight out of LaGuardia, NY�s other airport. Finally I also got set up for the night in a nearby motel in Queens, NY. It was nearer to LaGuardia than it was to JFK so I agreed, although at that point I would have agreed to most anything.
There was considerable confusion among Austrian Airlines personnel about who was arranging for the motel, but as soon as I found out the name of it, I burned it into my tired memory and I escaped with my luggage cart to a bathroom to clean up. A cleaning woman in the bathroom who barely spoke English shouted at me in the empty, sterile space and tried to prevent me from pushing my airport luggage cart in the disabled persons� stall. She said, �You can�t do that,� and I literally screamed, �I�m sick and I can�t carry everything but I need to keep my belongings together so leave me alone!� I doubted she understood what I said because she continued to mumble outside the stall, waiting for me to come out.
After proceeding outdoors and downstairs, I was too anemic and weak to fight everyone for a space on the first shuttle that came (after standing outdoors until 11:30 pm waiting for the one shuttle the Best Western had) and got left behind � even though I was one of the people who had been waiting in that group the longest. People from the flight who were also waiting could obviously see my condition at that point, but despite their previous sympathy they did push and shove their way in front of me and my luggage when the one and only shuttle came.
The airline representatives perched in the outside doorway told me that I would have to wait for the shuttle to return (30-45 minutes was what they whispered between themselves), but myself and a few other people that had been left behind argued and managed to get ourselves a cab courtesy of Austrian Airlines. It wasn�t even a real, legal cab � just a long black car which pulled up at the curb that one of the airline reps ran up to and got the guy to agree to take us. (I wondered what sucker looking for his name on a sign got jacked because the price was right.)
Several of us piled in the car, me in the front seat; I wasn�t waiting this time to treat myself right because I was nearing delirium and my obvious hygiene situation was apparent to others even at night. My first thought after sitting down was that the air conditioning was blasting even near midnight (look out for the dreaded evil wind!) and my second thought was the realization that the people in the backseat ONLY spoke Italian, had small children, and no real clue about what was going on.
�Welcome to America!� I thought in disgust, wondering if I had ever even departed the Balkans. The �cab� driver pulled away from the curb�and promptly got in a car accident by ramming the parked car in front of us. The driver, a large white man, leaped out, and starting screaming at our cab driver, who was Jamaican and didn�t speak English well. He just kept repeating, �My brother, this is no problem� over and over again. Noting the fear and dismay on the faces of the people in the backseat, I realized I could relate. The other guy eventually backed down and we were on our way.
The cab driver got lost on the way to the Best Western, which he had indicated to the airline rep that he knew the location of, and stopped three different times to ask directions. By the time I got to the motel AT 1 am (again, 7 am the next morning to my sick, weakened, jet-lagged body) with my lousy $15 per diem card, the motel diner was closing and all I could get was fried chicken, soda and French fries. I ordered some, ate little, put a chair in front of my bedroom door to keep it closed (the deadbolt and lock were BOTH non-functioning), and phoned my mom. I should have been at the Virginian Suites in Arlington, VA hours before, and I knew if I didn�t call she might be alarmed. My trembling lessened and I felt a little more at ease after we talked, but I had to almost left to think that a day before I had been in my village and now I was eating greasy fried chicken in a Queens, NY motel with a broken bedroom door.
I tried to call Nikola with my international phone card, but in my disorientation and sickness I dialed the wrong number, off by a digit, several times and never reached him. I fell asleep in my dirty clothes, wishing for Nikola, my dreams filled with confusion and sadness. I slept from around 1:30 am to 3:15 am, at which time I awoke, showered and had to catch the hotel shuttle to LaGuardia airport to catch my flight to Dulles. Too bad there were TOO MANY PEOPLE on the shuttle and I bullied the bully hotel manager until he offered me and three other young ladies, who had flights even earlier than mine, a cab courtesy of the hotel. When I explained to him that I was afraid if we waited for his only shuttle we would miss our flights, he had some choice words for me. For me. Amazing. After I rushed to my United Airlines flight that morning before 5 am, it was delayed until after 10 am.
It was now Thursday morning!! I sat numbly, with my hand around a cup of coffee, and commiserated with others in my situation. A United rep passed out $25 certificates. I met one American man who worked in Tirana, the capital of Albania, Macedonia�s neighbor to the west. Even though I was starting to cheer up, I was certain that in fact I wasn�t actually in the United States but rather still in the Balkans. Everyone I came into contact with, from the airline representatives, to the cab driver, to the man at the motel front desk, spoke some language other than English as their first language and communication was more than a little difficult and confusing.
I finally did get to Dulles, waited for more than two hours for the Austrian Airlines office to OPEN in order to file a claim for my lost baggage, and then took a shuttle to the Virginian Suites (medevac hotel). I arrived to a room where my roommate, who wasn�t present at the time, had all of her stuff spread across both beds, the floor, and just about everywhere else. The hotel didn�t know I was coming, didn�t have my paperwork any longer since I was a day late, my nurse at PC didn�t know who I was or that I was coming, and neither the duty officer nor my nurse returned my phone calls (until I finally bothered to go to the PC office two days later than I should have arrived).
I showered, somewhat unpacked, and WALKED a mile to Chipotle for lunch. I was very familiar with the D.C. area from my prior medevac. I sat on the patio in the sun and devoured an English-language (!) newspaper and afterwards I went underground on the biggest escalator I�ve ever seen (Rosslyn station) and took the Metro (still without sleeping) to Ronald Reagan National Airport to meet my mom�s flight. We went out for dinner and upon our return to the hotel, I found that my lost luggage had been delivered, and then I switched rooms to what I hoped would be a better situation. Life was starting to return to normal, but I was still too sick to walk more than 100 yards without stopping to rest. My resting heart rate in these days was around 110 beats per minute.