Perspective

The pessimist would tell my story this way: The morning of my departure from the DR, I couldn’t find my passport. (Classic me, right?) I show up to the airport with a photocopy of my passport that I had made before I left in June. Never thought I’d actually need to use it. So the American Airlines rep in Santiago calls ahead to immigration in Miami to clear me through, and says I shouldn’t have a problem. The key word here is shouldn’t. When I try to go through security, the guard tells me I can’t go through with just a copy of my passport, unless I have the very same AA rep walk me through. So I run back to the desk to grab him, only to find that he is no longer there. So I wait about 15 minutes for them to go through the process all over again and okay it a second time, all the while literally holding my breath. I finally got a different rep to walk me through security, and barely made it on the flight.
Thinking my troubles are over, when I arrive in Miami for my connecting flight, I get flagged in customs. The guy takes the copy of my passport and sends me to immigration, where I’m told I will wait about 15 minutes. Let’s just say that 15 minutes quickly (or should I say slowly…) became 3 ½ hours. Every single time I tried to get up and ask what was going on, someone would yell at me to sit down and wait my turn. Meanwhile, I am carrying a laptop for a friend who was traveling with me, and I can’t leave the immigration room to get it to her before she gets on her next flight (which was the same flight I was supposed to be on). It turns out, they lost my copy of my passport, and the officer I finally talked to after 3 ½ hours told me that they shouldn’t have even sent me to immigration. So he stamps my customs card and I rush out to see when the next available flight is. Well, I get stopped again, because apparently the officer who stamped my customs sheet failed to right the number 1 over the stamp. So I go back to immigration, and wait in line again to get all the way through customs. At this point, I have been told that because of all this mis-hap, I will always have to go through immigration when I come back to the State from out of country. Exciting times ahead.
So…I go to transfer to the next available flight, and after waiting in an hour-long line, I get to the receptionist who happens to be making plans with her girlfriends for Monday night. When she hangs up, I tell her I need the next available flight to Chicago, because I got held up in immigration. After staring at her computer for about 15 minutes, she says, “There is a fight RIGHT NOW! RUN!” So I run to re-check my luggage, run through security, and run about a half mile to my gate with no shoes on, and all my bags flailing in the air. When I get to my gate, they tell me I’m only a standby passenger, so I might not even make it on.
Eventually I did get to board the plane, still dripping with sweat from my half-mile run. Our departure time was delayed, so we sat in Miami for about a half hour before we took off. Then we had to be re-routed three different times due to extreme thunderstorms, (the severity of which the pilot announced he hadn’t witnessed in 33 years in flying). We flew around the Carolinas, up to Wisconsin, and actually right over Columbus, and finally landed in Chicago. At this point, I’ve already missed my connecting flight to Cleveland.Lucky for me, the last flight of Cleveland had been slightly delayed, so I hiked up my jeans and ran again (this time with shoes on), and just BARELY made it on the plane. It was a very tiny plane, and the guy next to me just so happened to take up half of my seat as well. Somewhat claustrophobic. But alas, I made it home to Cleveland! It’s a shame they lost my luggage in the process.


Here’s an optimist’s version: I managed to lose my passport the night before I left the DR to come home, but it’s a good thing I made a photocopy of it before I left the States! Normally you have to go to the embassy (which was Santo Domingo, about a 5 hours drive from where we were), to get a temporary passport to leave the country. But since the representative from American Airlines was familiar with Orphanage Outreach, she walked me through security and I got right on the plane. Amazing luck…or providence?
When I get to Miami, I get held up in immigration for a little over 3 hours, where I was the only American citizen in a room full of different nationalities and ethnicities. It was so cool to be in such a diverse atmosphere, and to hear so much Spanish being spoken in the States. Although it felt like forever to wait, I met handfuls of people with incredible stories. It was here that my little pee-brain mind was opened up to a whole new realm of injustices in the immigration system. The Martinez family was stopped in customs and sent to immigration because the security guard claimed that they had a “common last name”. Suspicious I guess. A very professional-looking and –sounding woman I met (in about her mid-30’s) from the Caiman Islands was flying through Miami to get back home from one of her frequent business trips to the States. This is about her 50th time being stopped in customs because she was born in Cuba. Though she is not a Cuban citizen, she spent that whole first year of her life in Cuba. Again, suspicious, right? Another woman I met was ethnically Haitian, and even though she was born and raised in the Bronx, they stopped her in customs and sent her to immigration without reason. In the small crowded immigration room are officers herding people like cattle, and yelling for people to sit down. The bathroom is a tin can on a floor. The atmosphere was filled with tension and oppression. And we waited at the mercy of the officers, while they took their time scrolling through files, calling another name every 10 minutes or so. (There were probably 60 or 70 people in this room…families, babies, elderly, you name it.) They treat you so disrespectfully here, unless they find out you’re an American citizen. Then they try to save face and get on your good side.
I tell you all this to say that I am so thankful I got to experience immigration first-hand. I never knew it was so appallingly inhumane and undignifying. I had amazing conversations with the people I met during these four hours, some regarding more serious issues of prejudice and racism, and some more along the lines of comic relief (thank God for Kimberly, my Haitian friend, who has a smart mouth…she was absolutely hilarious). It’s one thing to hear people’s stories, and be aware that our system of immigration is slightly complicated, but it’s a whole different story to witness so much injustice first-hand. I could NEVER regret my experience at the Miami airport. It was such a painfully beautiful learning experience: something that I couldn’t have learned any other way. Even after I left immigration, I ran into my friend from the Caiman Islands periodically, as I was waiting in line to transfer my flight. It was kind of a cool thing to feel keep bumping into people I had already met...my little airport community.
When I got on my plane, I met a Bolivian girl a little older than me who spoke perfect English and perfect Spanish. She is studying physical therapy in Chicago, and she was home for the summer visiting her family. We had some amazing talks about both of our experiences in Miami customs, and she told me that she was stopped to for a reason which they never told her. This girl was hands-down the best airplane stranger I’ve ever met. We did the Sudoku puzzle and word games from the newspaper clippings Mrs. Miralia sent me down in the DR :) It was really a fun plane ride.
On my flight to Cleveland, I sat next to a man who grew up all over the world as a military kid, and went to boarding school in England. He just recently came back from a hunting trip in South Africa. Very interesting conversations we had. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I saw the most beautiful skies I’ve ever seen in my whole life. On our way to Chicago, we literally flew into the sunset. The sky was hot pink and orange: brighter and more vibrant than I’ve ever seen. After it got dark, we saw the coolest thunderstorms from the plane: huge cumulonimbus clouds and bolts of lightning flashing ever five seconds or so, literally lighting up the entire sky. Like I said, the coolest skies I’ve ever seen.

So you see, it’s all about perspective really. Honestly I think it's an exhausting task to be an optimist. But the thing about optimism is that it has the capacity to make your experiences so much richer…like every minute actually has value.

Lesson learned: Optimism is taxing, but so worthwhile.