Bit by bit, it’s all coming together — yesterday we finally got reimbursed for part of our claim to cover evacuation expenses. Yeah, we’ve been waiting that long. We submitted the paperwork over two months ago and it kept getting kicked around from department to department until someone agreed to pay it. I was like, “Look. I wanted to stay in Egypt, but it was a mandatory evacuation. You have all our clothes, toiletries, toys, and other stuff and you have our money. Pay up!” Except I didn’t actually have anyone to say it to, so poor Josh had to listen to my frequent rantings.
And then, the headache with the packout of our apartment in Egypt. We went round and round with the shipping people there because they said we were 223 pounds over our allowed weight limit for an air shipment . . . with our size family we actually rate 1600 lbs, but something about the only available flights from Cairo were commercial, so there was a cap of 1000 lbs . . . blah, blah, blah. So they wanted to open our crate that contained the things we moved back in early November that has been sitting in customs for the past four months just to add the excess 223 lbs. But once you break the seal on a shipment, things have a way of “disappearing” so we didn’t think that was an acceptable solution. The other option they gave us was to have us pay the excess baggage fee, but that wasn’t an acceptable solution either.
In a phone call with Josh the other night I was ranting about how everyone was acting like it was a normal move. Like we chose to ship all those things and that’s why we were over the weight limit. I told him I didn’t care how it got to us, I just wanted to get it moving. I said, “Put it on a boat — heck, put it on a camel and walk it here! I don’t care how they want to ship it, I just want it moving in this direction!” He said, “I’m totally going to tell them that.”
I thought it was too rude, but he didn’t so he sent them an email saying exactly that and next thing you know he got a reply saying that the overage had been approved and to not worry about it any longer. We suspect that the people in the Egypt travel office didn’t inform the higher ups that this was a case with special circumstances and as soon as they heard that we had been evacuated and weren’t even able to be present for the pack-out, then they became much more accommodating.
The thing is, it’s all just stuff. Meaning we don’t need any of it in the grand scheme of life. So I’ve been trying to stay relaxed about all the delays both once we arrived in Egypt and now here in Oman. But it gets frustrating when we have to spend $50 for each pair of new cleats for Calvin and Carter so they can play soccer/rugby when I know we already have perfectly fitting, expensive cleats sitting in a box in a warehouse. Or buying a new mattress when we already own one, but we have to wait for someone to approve the funding to have it delivered here. (I’m not complaining about the mattress though — I came out the winner in that deal. And when it arrives it will become our guest bed. Win.Win.Win.)
In one of my favorite books, Same Kind of Different As Me, there’s a quote that reminds me to be careful of how I think about our stuff. The book is about a friendship between a homeless man and a wealthy art dealer and their faith (If you haven’t read it, I *highly* recommend it. I can’t give a short description that does it justice).
One of the things that becomes clear is that the homeless man, Denver, is content with his life and has no desire to trade places with his rich friend. From page 112-113 Denver asks:
“I know it ain’t none of my business, but does you own somethin that each of of them keys fits?”
I glanced at the keys; there were about ten of them. “I suppose,” I replied, not really ever having thought about it.
“Are you sure you own them, or does they own you?”
So I’m trying to remember that life is simpler with less stuff. Less to organize, less to clean, less to worry about. Of course if you asked the people at Amazon, they’d tell you that I’ve already got plenty of stuff, with more on the way. Who needs a shipment when you have the internet?