As early as the beginning of September, I have wanted to go to a little-visited country in the Horn of Africa called Ethiopia. I had just found out that some friends would be moving there shortly and I hoped that, as a somewhat experienced expatriate by now, I could encourage them in their transition. "I don't know if this is from the LORD or not," I wrote in an email, "but can I come visit you?"
The two of them--my friend and her husband--had been on my heart ever since I first learned of their trans-Altantic venture. I had met the couple two years before through an organization that we were all three a part of in my hometown. Because we were close in age and season of life, those of us in the group became close friends. As they had already bid farewell to the members of the organization back home, I felt so sure that I was in a unique position to come alongside them in tangible moral support: I was already out of the country and had already been dealing with many of the situations foreigners tend to face away from home.
If I could just get to them! I thought. I felt so sure I’d get to go for Chuseok, but by the time I checked out ticket prices, only two weeks before the proposed flight dates, they were already far too rich for my meager teacher’s salary. Perhaps I’d be able to afford a ticket for my next week-long holiday, Christmas. It was her favorite holiday, I knew, one that she loved spending with family. If she was necessarily away on Christmas, maybe having me there would make home seem less a little less far away.
My Korean friend Young Sook, who happened to be a travel agent, came over to my house at the beginning of November for dinner. As she sat on my floor enjoying peppery two-bean chili, I told her about the possibility of going to Ethiopia. It was the first time I had voiced my potential plans to anyone besides the friends I would visit, and the first time I actually felt that the trip could happen. Hope filled the night as we sat chatting endlessly about the opportunity. “Ethiopia,” she said in amazement. “Your ticketing, I want.”
Like a good travel agent, that night she advised me when it would be a good time to book such a flight: thirty to forty days out would be best, she noted. Armed with the dates we had chosen for the trip--Sunday, December 26 through Saturday, the first--she worked steadily each week of November to find me a good deal. By Thanksgiving, we would surely need a ticket reserved, if not already bought. Three weeks after the initial friendly consultation, amid piles of the spicy legs and wings of Thanksgiving fried chicken at her house, Young Sook informed me that she had finally reserved an itinerary for me. Perfect. All that was left now was to purchase it.
Because my reservations would only be held for one week, Young Sook asked me to pay for the flight by the second of December. I marked it on my cell phone’s calendar: “Confirm and pay for ticket by this date,” read the memo attached to the following Thursday. One step closer.
Thursday night grew ever closer, and with its approach, a growing sense of dread filled my heart. From its conception, I had been debating the wisdom of such a weighty decision as spending $1500 on something so frivolous as a plane ticket. Here I was on the eve of purchase with no more sense of peace than when I had started praying about the trip in September.
My hesitation to follow through was two-fold: The ticket Young Sook had found would cost $1800, almost double what I had found by myself weeks ago while searching quickly for a deal online. Already nervous about spending much of my savings on the trip, I didn't know how prepared I was to fork over all of it just on a ride to get me there. The other problem was that the night my friend had found the tickets, I had more than enough to cover the price in my account back home; one week later, however, due to pesky little things called student loans, I would be short $200. Whatever other reason for not following through, I knew that purchasing tickets that day would be financially impossible.
That Saturday, December 4, I decided to visit my friend Josh's Bible study in Seoul. He was scheduled to leave country the following week for a permanent change of duty stations, but would be at the Bible study one last time--so I thought I would come for moral support. It proved to be a powerful afternoon, with many opportunities for the LORD to speak His truth to the hearts that were gathered: We listened to a DVD message about sin being more than just a mistake and to both Josh and another Jennifer giving their testimonies.
We also had an opportunity to ask for prayer. While sharing my thoughts about my hagwon and whether to stay in South Korea for a few more months, I considered telling them about my pending trip to Ethiopia. In the end, however, I decided that details of the visit need not be shared.
After finishing our time of prayer, Jenn, the girl who had just told us her story, leaned over to where I sat on the floor, with what she felt was a message from the LORD. "He's asking you to make a decision," she conveyed, "but it’s only because He loves you." I muled her words over in my brain for a few moments as the reality of it sank in. My interpretation: Decide not to go to Ethiopia. Because He loves you.
The more I thought of it, the more I was sure the decision would necessarily be a negative one--a fact I conveyed to my friend in Ethiopia when I chatted with her online about the trip.
"But that's not what she said!" she interrupted, referring to Jenn's message. "Even if it's not to go to Ethiopia, it's not negative. God's plan for you is always the best."
Though I knew she was right, I was still disappointed. "I really want to come," I told her.
“I want you to come, too,” my friend replied. “But if you’re fighting God about it, you would be miserable.”
In the middle of the following week, I wrote in my prayer journal that I felt God had been steadily preparing me for what I was then facing. My paycheck for the month had been two days late by this time and I would still be waiting for it another two days. "If I encounter some emergency between now and the time I get paid," I wrote, "I have money back home to cover it. But if I had bought my plane ticket to Ethiopia last week, I wouldn't have. I never felt released to do so--and now I know why."
That week, I didn't see Young Sook until Friday, the day I was finally paid. "You still think Ethiopia," she told me as we walked toward the bus stop together. "I think not." What I didn't tell her that night was that I was beginning to feel the same thing.
One of my initial worries about paying for the flight had to do with needing enough money left over for transportation and shopping. As I sat crunching numbers in my tiny apartment, I figured I could still make the trip if I bought minimal groceries in December, saved all of my "fun money" for the month until I landed in Africa, and if I was specific in what kind of Christmas present my family could get me.
"Instead of sending me a package this year," I asked them via email, "why not contribute to my trip to Ethiopia?" I was worried for a week as no one had responded to my request, but then I started getting confirmation from them one-by-one. Perhaps the trip was still on!
Wednesday night, December 15, I made one final online search for tickets to Ethiopia leaving from Seoul December 26. As it was a week and a half from the date of departure, I was sure that quotes would be hiked and not affordable. But there it was on my computer screen, the exact price from a month before: China Southern Air, multiple stops, $900. With fees and et cetera, the total cost would come to a little over $1300 USD--much less than Young Sook's estimate, with wiggle room and cash to spare. The trip was finally starting to materialize.
Quickly, I sent her a text message: "I found a ticket I can afford," I wrote.
The next morning, she sent me something back. "Wow trips," she wrote in broken English. "OK!! See you."
That night we sat at her computer to pay for my ticket. I showed her the price that I had found and she instantly got to work. It was like witnessing language fluency, watching Young Sook swiftly punch things like “26DECICNCAN*CZ” into a database system that reminded me of a blue-backed version of DOS. Through various airport acronyms and one-letter commands, within minutes she had put together the exact itinerary for the same price I had found the previous day. I was amazed.
When she had first seen the website I had used, she couldn't believe that the ticket could be 400,000 won less than what she had initially put together for me. Dismayed, she tried to suggest that the site must have offered a fifty percent discount. But finding the price there, amid trusted abbreviations staring back at her, she could not deny the website's accuracy. An affordable price secure in my mind, I told my friend that I had planned to use my American account to purchase the ticket, and we agreed to fax over my information the very next morning.
The morning of December 17, our school's secretary sent over to Young Sook's office the documents necessary for securing my safe passage to Ethiopia. Hours later, the fax still had not gone through. By the time it finally worked, Young Sook sent a desperate message with her account number and bank's name in Korean: "Jennifer," it read, "only cash... ticketing!!"
I called her back moments later, as I should have been preparing to feed my students lunch. "Jeny-pah," she said soothingly. "We are ticketing cash only. Lunchtime, you go. Call you. Happy lunch."
Through a volley of text messages and phone calls that afternoon between classes, with Grace acting as translator, I was able to extrapolate the story: Apparently one of the airlines that Korean travel agencies work with—which just so happened to be the airline I was trying to fly with, China Southern Air--did not accept foreign credit or debit cards. Either I could head to Seoul that instant and physically swipe my card at Young Sook's office, or I could withdraw the money from a global ATM and deposit it into her account. As I had already spent my forty-minute break period for the day and still faced a completely booked afternoon without liberty to fly off to Seoul, the only possibility for me was to visit the local bank.
The prospect of transferring money into someone's account was already nerve-racking, but knowing that I needed first to convert it to cash, which could be lost or stolen, upped the ante. Nervously, I fit my foreign card into the mouth of the ATM and pressed the "English" button, asking to withdraw 1,000,000 won (about $800) from my American account. Denied twice, I finally just asked for 500,000, which the machine spit out in fifty bright green 10,000-won bills. There I stood with a two-inch wad of cash, my entire student loan payment for the month in my hands. This being just under a third of what I needed, I tried withdrawing 500,000 more only to be denied again. Struck with the realization that my limit for ATM withdrawals on the account was $500, I sulked back upstairs to class.
"I couldn't take out the money," I tried telling Young Sook as I stood at the elevator. "I can't buy the ticket today."
"Jeny-pah," she replied. "Call you back."
"No, I have class," I tried to say--but she hung up and cheerily called me right back, just as promised. Again I tried explaining that I wasn't able to transfer the money and needed to go to class. When she still didn't seem to understand, I told her I would just have to call her back during my break.
On the phone with her forty minutes later, she reminded me that airport ticketing agencies would close at five and that I should transfer the money right away. I tried explaining the situation, but as I had gotten nowhere by the start of my next class, I handed the phone to back to Grace. Moments later, as I began instructing my near-fluent seven-year-olds, Grace knocked on my door, her basket of teaching supplies in hand. It was just a few minutes till four p.m.
"Jenny-fur," she said nervously, "ah, you have to go to the bank and transfer money to the account. Go to KB bank. You have to be back by four-thirty. You have to go now! They close at four." Quickly I explained the lesson to her, grabbed my jacket, and raced downstairs, trying to beat time.
I first approached KEB, a branch just a block away on the corner of our winding street, only to see their "365 Bank" open but the staircase leading to the lobby on the second floor barred by a heavy metal gate. "No," I shouted to the blinking automatic tellers. It was then that I remembered I needed to find KB instead, and walked back outside to search the business district's towering edifice. Spotting the bank mere yards away, I ducked inside and tried the second floor.
The elevator opened and I stepped into an empty hallway with a gated entrance to my right, moments too late. Just as I turned to go back downstairs, a door to the side of the gate swung open enough for two figures to emerge, the shiny wooden flooring from the lobby beckoning me from the other side.
One of the figures I noted to be a young employee of KB bank, and I asked him desperately if I could come in. "Mo-ney trans-puh," I offered feebly, to which he reluctantly agreed. He led me through the deserted lobby to a woman's desk and began filling out requisite paperwork for the exchange. I held up my card to show them the money wasn't coming from a Korean bank. "Can I use this?" I asked. At the sight of the card, he offered to escort me downstairs and to another global ATM for me to withdraw the necessary cash.
"I can't," I said as we waited for the gate to lift enough to duck through the opening. "I can't take out any more money. I will show you." I stood with the two employees for several minutes as I tried in vain to take out more cash, being denied each time.
Back upstairs, members of the bank staff asked to call my travel agency and as I waited for them to get in touch with Young Sook, I had another idea. "Can I borrow your computer?" I asked the young man. If cash wouldn't do it, an online transfer might work. I glanced at my cell phone: 4:27. I might have just enough time.
The young man showed me to a computer that could have been as ancient as my ten-year-old desktop I had left back home. While waiting for it to boot up, staff members motioned me to the phone. "Jenny-pah," Young Sook said sympathetically. "Air-fort close five p.m. Today not ticketing. Today my home you go." I nodded and put the phone back in its cradle.
That night at Young Sook's house, I tried booking the flight online--only to be told by the website that my bank in the States had denied such a hefty purchase. Young Sook nodded understandingly. "China Southern Airlines," she said, "cash only." We agreed for me to call my bank, ask for permission to withdraw more money, and meet again the following day.
At 10:15 that Saturday morning, eight days exactly to the day of my flight, I showed up at her doorstep, ready to hand over the rest of the ticket price and be on my way. After all, my bank had assured me the night before that the limit on my account would be temporarily raised enough to cover the cost. Young Sook and I approached another global ATM to discover the same problem still existed--only now I had in my hands not one student loan payment, but two.
"It's okay," she said to me. "You give me one million and I pay the rest. You give me money Monday. Okay?" I agreed and walked her to KB to deposit the cash. Later, as the bus to Byeongjeom Station pulled up to its nearest stop, she assured me that she would have the tickets before one that afternoon.
In front of the ATM at the top of the steps of the station, she called back. "Jenny-fur, oops," she said by way of apology. "My account not money. Your one million, but not money." Apparently, then, we would have to purchase the journey one leg at a time. "Which ticket you want? Incheon to Gwangxou (China) ticketing, okay?"
As I sat semi-comfortably on the subway, my phone rang again, this time with worse news. "You on your way to Seoul?" she asked, hoping I wasn't. "Jenny-pah, yesterday Ethiopia flight one seat, you remember? Today not. No seat."
My heart sank further as I continued to listen. It was hard to hear her over the roar of the train, but the message was clear--exactly what I knew the LORD had been prompting for weeks.
"Tomorrow we are meeting ticketing okay?"
"No," I said authoritatively. "No. I can't go."
"There's been a change of plan," I wrote in my next email to my friend in Ethiopia, relaying the myriad complications of failing to purchase my ticket.
"Sweet Jennifer," she wrote back, "I think God's REALLY trying to tell you he has other plans for you next week. I love you, and I wish I could get to see you, but we need to walk in obedience more than anything."
All I could say in reply were four simple words: "I. think. you're. right."
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