Abductions, Italians, and Our Foray Into Homeless Living

Remember a day when your plan went wrong.

Maybe the kids acted up, the printer broke, or the dog decided that now was a great time to go on the kitchen floor. Whatever it was, imagine that stress sustained for an unrelenting week.

No one can say that I wasn’t warned. I was told that serving here in Lesvos would be hard, I knew that it would drain me, I just didn’t expect it to start before I got here.

Our first red flag came in Tunis. A guard stopped Mom and Sarah and me and couldn’t seem to understand that we were traveling together because we were neighbors and friends. We shook our heads and chuckled at the confused man, and the beginning of a worry tapped on the window of my mind.

Next, the passport security guard turned to Sarah and demanded, “Where is your permission?”

After a flurry of Arabic of which I caught very little, Sarah exclaimed, “But I’m French! See?” She pointed at her very French passport. The man looked at her, gave a little shrug, and inked the paper with his little red stamp.

“What was that about?” I asked as we wheeled our suitcases toward security.

Sarah swung her arms wide, giving me a wide-eyed, irritated expression. “He said I didn’t have my…”

“Permission form, right?” Mom asked.

“Yeah! I need a permission form signed by my father to leave the country until I’m thirty-five!” She exclaimed, disbelief in her voice. She had never traveled without her family before, and the existence of such a rule for Tunisians was news to her.

“Well, at least he let you through,” I said, and left it at that.

Our plane to Rome waited a bit too long on the runway, and by the time we got there I was sweating with pent-up anxiety. We bolted through the airport but snagged at every turn as people with badges pulled Sarah aside, saw that her passport was French, and let her through. By the time we got to the passport security lines, our flight was boarding.

Mom approached the woman directing everyone into their respective lines. “Excuse me, our flight is boarding right now, can we…” She pointed to the time on the ticket and the huge sign declaring a shorter line for people whose flight left in less than an hour.

“No, this line,” The slim woman declared. “Ma’am, this line.” Mom cast Sarah a worried glance as she separated to enter the much shorter EU citizen track.

She should have focused her worries elsewhere. Sarah did indeed reach the desk before us, but was forced to stand and wait as we inched closer to the front of our line and checked the time every two minutes. Eventually she was told to stand aside, and an Italian man in a uniform and greying hair came and began to lead her away. Mom’s eyes paled, and she rushed off to intercept, leaving me in line with the bags.

“Excuse me, where are you taking her?” Sarah stood by the man, schooling her face into calm acquiescence.

The man turned, irritated. “Are you her mother?”

Mom gave a nervous laugh slightly higher than the usual octave. “Me? Well, I’m like her mother, we, well, I’m friends with her mother. She’s friends with my daughter.” She pointed a finger in my direction.

The man burst into Italian, conversing with the woman who had directed us into line. Their conversation stretched, forcing me to heft the bags out of the way of the slowly inching line, but I couldn’t hear much of it. Finally the man exploded with an exclamation of “Impossible, impossible!” and began to lead Sarah away. She cast one fearful look toward Mom, then smiled slightly in an attempt to be comforting.

Mom’s eyes had gone paler, and she approached the woman again. “Where are they taking her?”

The woman looked down at her and replied, “It’s impossible, she cannot go. Just leave her.”

Mom panicked, voice shooting up. “We can’t just leave her! She’s my friend’s… She’s my responsibility…”

Mom started walking in the direction Sarah had been taken, and with no other choice the woman directed us to the tiny glass office where Sarah stood, waiting. Men yelled in Italian inside and insisted it was impossible several more times. Meanwhile we found out that while Sarah’s French passport was technically expired, her father had gone to the embassy and gotten the proper documentation for her to travel. We couldn’t explain this, though, because they couldn’t seem to find anyone who spoke English, French, Arabic, or Spanish as well as the Italian they used so generously.

At long last, without an intelligible word, the same man who had led Sarah away spit us out onto a random back way of the airport. We arrived at our gate, sweating and panting after a mad sprint, fifteen minutes too late.

The next flight was at ten pm, and we managed to get on that one with minimal problems (we dashed around that corner of the airport, panicked when the flight vanished from the board, and met a mother daughter couple in the same bewildered predicament as us). Upon arrival, the same mother daughter couple we met in Rome gave us a ride in their rental (once they located it after an hour searching in the massive and dark parking lot and crammed us and our luggage in up to our chins) to the twisting, confusing cobbled street of the shopping district on which our apartment was located.

Once we tugged our bags up the cobbles, located the hidden key that the Air BnB hosts told us how to find, and fit it in the lock… it wouldn’t turn.

It was then about four in the morning. We jiggled the key around a bit in increasing desperation until Mom insisted that I arrange the suitcases, pull out a blanket and pillow, and rest with Sarah, who had dropped onto the pavement with her head in her hands in a posture of quiet and exhausted despair.

When the Air BnB host arrived almost an hour later with a new key, we all thanked him in grateful chorus from the bottom of our hearts and sank into the clouds of the beds and the arms of sleep with reckless abandon.

Athens was perfect.

When I first read Tolkien’s admission in The Hobbit (a masterpiece of which I have a particularly excellent copy of which I am exceedingly proud) that good times make bad stories, I felt it wise. The elvish beauty of Rivendell and the ancient beauty of Athens make poor tales, so suffice it to say that the day went as well as it could ever have gone, our feet hurt in the end, I caught a violent cold, and we had to run to catch our flight to Lesvos.

I could never have been prepared for the worlds we encountered here.