Part 6

The sunset lit the western sky with a huge , orange glow. We turned onto a gravelled, potholey "road " the led towards the tarmac. The convoy of vehicles turned right, off of the gravel laneway crawled with armoured personnel carriers, tanks, fork lifts, supply trucks, police, and anything else a person could think of. We turned onto a patch of dried out, sun-baked grass beside a small knoll.
The federal agent that we knicknamed Cowboy"(behind his back, because he didn't seem friendly) jumped out of the lead vehicle's passenger seat. He addressed the soldiers that were quickly coming over, concerned for some strange terrorist threat involving a group of orphans, perhaps.
"Gentlemen, I'm a federal agent, and I'm commandeering there patch of ground. We have 83 orphans that need to catch a flight to the U.S!" he said. What a cowboy!! Seriously!! A little too much Holliwood, if you ask me.
We unloaded onto the small knoll. Many diapers needed changing, as the stress of the past week's events was now causing a blitz of diarrhea throughout the kids, especially the young ones.
F was so good. He never fussed, whimpered , or complained. He just snuggled even closer. The noise at the airport was so loud at times, it could make a grown man wet the bed, but 83 kids were totally awesome.
Planes took off, planes landed, helicopters went in all directions, trucks rolled by. It was totally dark now, and I had three kids onmy lap, and F snuggled tightly against me. The only significant thing that stood out all evening was when a Hum-vee drove up to us, much to close, and a bunch of the older toddlers jumped back screaming, worried that they were going to be run over. It was not unrealistic. The driver just didn't care that he scared the kids,but the kids on my lap, and F never flinched. They just trusted me.
F loved the planes. His evening was spent following the planes and helicopters with his eyes until he could no longer see them. Each one brought a huge grin to his face. When there were no planes, which was not very often, I would show the four of them things that they'd never seen before. I picked some green grass to show them, but at first it freaked them out because they had never seen a blade of grass before. A centipede about 8 inches long crawled out of the grass where I had picked it, so I killed it. They are not deadly here, but their inch long pinchers can really hurt, and all these kids just didn't need that.
Eventually, they were all okay with sitting on the grass. It wasn't going to hurt them. I pointed out the moon to them, and a huge grin spread across F's face. Eventually , F fell back to sleep.
. . . . . .

He awoke with a start. We were boarding an airplane, and it was so loud, that if I were to yell , you probably could not hear me. I could hardly hear myself! F just looked at me with a puzzled expression on his face, and burried his head against my chest.
I took him onto the plane, and found a nice looking couple sitting about halfway down on the right-hand side. They looked trusting to me. I handed F to them, gave them a few instructions, said goodbye to F, then turned and bawled my eyes out, but only for a moment. All the stress of the past few days was released, and it felt so good. I said goodbye to him one more time. He was wide awake now. He was very aware that I had just handed him off to complete strangers, volunteers who flew from Miami to escort these kids to their parents waiting eagerly for them. F had a bit of a worried look on his face, but he trusted me, and I was telling him it was going to be alright. What a trooper.
I turned, wiped my eyes, and walked off the plane. I had too. I would never see him again, because we are not allowed to contact the adopting families. There was still work to be done. Quickly I almost ran down the flight off stairs to the tarmac, ducked under the plane, crossed to the other side, and helped the guys in the group to unload the plane. It was the third plane to GLA since our flight, and this was still a part of the same 12,000 lbs we tried to load in Miami so very, very long ago. (Long story) Could it really have been just days?
We loaded a tap-tap with some of the supplies, bound for another organization somewhere. At least this stuff was being shared, and there's no more efficient way to do it than to have the organization pull up to the plane, and then we load them up with supplies. This would never happen in most places in the world. There was no security. We waved at the security earlier that day when we turned off the road onto the gravelled road, so very long ago. Was it really only four hours ago?
We loaded our vehicles with the rest of the supplies. As I climbed into a waiting SUV, I thought again of F. I hoped he was okay, and I was pretty sure he was taking it all in stride as just another day. But it wasn't just another day. Today, tonight in only a few more hours he would be with his forever family. his life would never be the same, and neither would mine.
His name was Finder.