slight change of plans

It has been one crazy and eventful week. I don't even know where to begin.

I said in my last post that it would be one of my last because we were headed to Thailand for a two week trip and then home on May 8th. Well things have gone quite a different direction since then!

Last Friday we left our school with tearful goodbyes to our of our friends and kids. We took a train to Chennai accompanied by our two good friends Vara and Ramana who helped us a ton with our 6 giant bags we planned to check on the plane. Each of us also carried a full backpacking pack... too much luggage! On the train we had a minor mishap because three of our tickets we had booked were still waitlisted and were never confirmed, but we ended up paying a small fee and were on our way. We reached the airport in Chennai and said some more sad goodbyes to Vara and Ramana and headed for the check in counter...Here we spent the next two hours struggling with the Air Asia people about our bags. Apparently it is not possible to check an extra bag without a major kick to the your wallet. We were going to have to pay $480 for our excess weight between the three of us. Instead we unloaded as much as we could bare to part with and left it in the airport for some lucky security guard who would find it. The fee's were now only $200. Lucky us. Next we got in line for customs, which we barely made it into with our giant carry on backpacks. So far we felt like we had gotten lucky, but then everything went down hill... At the counter, we were stopped and told that we didn't have the proper registration papers to leave the country and we needed to go back to Kadapa in order to get them. No begging, pleading, or offers of money would help us.

We left the airport stunned and at a loss for what to do. The rest of the weekend consisted of many stressful events including sleeping on the ground, getting ripped off by a cab driver, phones calls to the US embassy, waiting and waiting and more waiting only to get to the Foreign Registration Office which opened on Monday and be told that we needed to go back to Kadapa once more. Talk about false hope!

We finally accepted the fact that we would be going back to Kadapa and got on the next night bus. This is about a 7 hour journey, and then 1.5 hours more out to our school. So this last week we have worked our tails off getting these papers and only yesterday (Sabbath) did we finally have the triumphant moment of holding them in our hands! Countries like this don't make it easy to get stuff like this done, especially in a timely matter. For more details about "getting our papers," which a long, but good story in itself, you can visit our joint blog sidtrevandbrookeinindia.blogspot.org. We will be posting the long version (in a nice, entertaining list format) very soon! But long story short, we were illegally living in India because we didn't properly register with the police when we came and we stayed longer than 6 months. If we had left just 20 days before, we would have gotten out just fine. Since we have our papers, we have been instructed to leave the country immediately (which we have no problem with).

Tonight (Sunday) we are finally heading back to Chennai and will be getting on a plane bound for North America on Monday night! We decided to skip to Thailand adventure this time and are really excited to just get home... It has been a long ten extra days in India and I think we are all ready for some American culture.

This last adventure in India was full of miracles and we are so thankful for everything who prayed for us. I don't know if I've had that many people praying for me at the same time ever in my life. So thank you to everyone who contributed! God worked in so many ways helping us to get those papers. I know there is some reason behind our extra stay in India. Although I may not know it now, I sure I will sometime in my future!

See you soon America!