Missing Passport Saga Solved

If you've ever traveled internationally then you know the complications, paperwork, stress, uncertainty, questions, and necessity of having a valid passport. There is also the potential depending on where your destination may be, how long you will be there, and the nature of your trip, that a visa stamp in your passport may be necessary.

As our mission team prepared in August and September for our trip to Paraguay/Brazil in October, we took the necessary steps to make sure the entire team had a valid passport into our hands so we could send them off together for the visa stamp that Paraguay requires for entry into the country......

On Thursday, October 2nd, eight days before our first team was to depart on the 10th, we noticed that our passports had not yet been returned from the agency doing our visa stamps. Naturally we checked with the mailroom only to notice that the Fed-Ex package had arrived that Monday and had been signed for, even though we hadn't yet seen it!!! Frantically we started looking around all parts of the mailroom where a Fed-Ex package might have been set off to the side or fallen behind a shelf. With no luck in finding the missing passports in our mailroom we started asking different parts of this HUGE Hyde Park Baptist world if someone might have the package in their area by mistake. We asked the School if it was in their mailroom or the athletic offices, we searched in the education staff offices, the different international ministries, the music ministry, the business office, the Children's Development Center; we even had a couple of secretaries stop everything and grab a team to walk through each room possible in the building looking for the missing passports. We sent out emails to all staff alerting them of the missing package, and put up signs with red writng that said ATTENTION and explained the need to be on the lookout.

Long story longer, I had to tell our team on Saturday, October 4 that we were missing all the passports and had 3 choices, 1) not go on the trip, 2) find the passports, or 3) all drive to the Houston Consulatethis week and report lost passports, have new ones issued, and FedEx them overnight for the new visa stamps. Our team of young professionals were all overwhelmingly positive and were able to find the time to take off from work on Tuesday or Friday and drive to Houston....Road Trip! We were able to get all the paperwork done (again), spend some time together with our team, and get all of the newly issued passports FedExed off for new visa stamps. As you can read in the previous blog, we had the passports returned with our visas and had a great trip. My guess at this point was not that someone had clandestinely slipped into the church offices and pulled an Oceans 11 move on our group's passports and was selling them on the black market, but instead that they would probably show up 6 months down the road somehow. Sometimes things happen faster than you anticipate...

In the DFW airport one of our team members was checking his voicemail and received a message from someone at the church that had called while we were in South America. The team member said "My heart sank as I listened to his message. The message said that he had a FedEx package in his office with my name on it." Of course the team member didn't bring it up to anyone as we sat in the DFW airport eating breakfast. Last night however while he was at church, he was able to get his hands on the package, and sure enough inside sat a stack of passports with a rubberband around them, all with visa stamps inside!

The name of the guilty party in this story has not been mentioned so as to protect him from the hands of the mission team members and the great embarassment that they might feel. I would like to say however that it is nice to have the passports back in our hands so people can "have their stamps" from other trips they had taken, and that the next time something like this happens the music ministry associates will be getting personal calls from me.