Travel disruption

The UK being the centre of a new Coronavirus strain isn’t good news for our travel plans!

Last night we got an email from our travel agent that Cathay Pacific cancelled our flights in 2 weeks from Port Moresby (PNG) to London. The airline has cancelled flights into the UK, with the next flight being on Jan 20th.

Crisis mode again. Our travel agent recommended an alternative flight with British Airways and so we went ahead and booked – getting home soon to put ourselves under midwife care is a priority!
A refund is on the way for the tickets, but until then we had to pay for the new (more expensive) tickets. Travel insurance should (should being a loaded word there) help out the costs of cancellation, Problem solved.

Until we checked in with our team on the ground here who told us those flights aren’t going to work. In order to transfer through Hong Kong we need our boarding passes printed for our onward leg before we leave Papua New Guinea and that only works for certain airlines, British Airways not being one of them.

We’re a little disappointed our travel agent didn’t catch that (the information is available on Air Niugini’s website) and now we’re in crisis again. We need to cancel our tickets and attempt to rebook with Cathay Pacific (for whom Air Niugini is able to print boarding passes ) aiming to travel through Hong Kong to another European airport and onwards to London. So far then we’ve bought tickets 3 times and we’re out of pocket £8,600 until refunds arrive but ticket purchase number 4 will hopefully see us home! We’re praying we’ll see some refunds and insurance cover too!

It feels like problem after problem. International travel while pregnant, with a toddler, is challenging at the best of times; it feels like we’re attempting to travel at the worst of times.

Our daily battle is to bring glory to God by trusting him. Despite the fact that we’ve seen God provide time after time we find that new problems come and fill the foreground of our vision. Only a week and a half ago we were in Kovol praying for a gap in the clouds so that the helicopter could get us out to the clinic.
Funny that experiencing God’s providence time and time again doesn’t seem to help for the next challenge!

It’s easy to give way to fear. It’s right for us to think through solutions to the problem and think about some backup plans, but the challenge is to do the necessary work and then cast our anxieties on the Lord because he cares for us.
We’ve got all day to wait before the travel agent’s office in the UK opens and that means lots of moment to moment decisions to not give in to fear but to trust our provider. He’s not let us down so far. We’re not expecting him to let us down this time.