The missing plane

It was our last day in China. The week in the city where my own child’s history began where I led a team to serve alongside the same women who had cared for her before I could was life changing. I tried to capture a few last quintessential images before we boarded a plane for home.

 

The 13 of us boarded a plane to Beijing from Xi’an and quietly boarded a van to go to our hotel for a quick night’s sleep before leaving for the states in the morning. We were tired and emotional and processing all that we had seen and experienced.

We had no idea what we were walking into when we arrived.

White vans with satellites filled the traffic circle in front of the hotel and blocked the van we were in. Men and women with cameras by their sides stood outside smoking and anxiously looking around, seemingly worried their break might cost them some big break. We were forced to park further away than we wished and complained as we pulled our luggage out and hiked to the revolving glass doors revealing a lobby bustling with activity. We made light of it, laughing with each other about what Chinese rockstar might be staying in the same hotel that night.

And, then we went inside to witness what has become quintessential images themselves of something else entirely.

There was tangible grief in that lobby and filling those rooms. Women wrung their hands in fancy chairs as others vainly tried to pat their back in comfort. We stood stunned at the sight of it all, asking our guide to explain what we were seeing. She didn’t want to.

We learned about the missing Malaysian airplane via texts sent to home as we stood feet away from the families of the victims. We struggled to piece the story together using our families at home and our phones with V P Ns. And, then we proceeded to our rooms, wondering what the evening would hold, anxious about what security might be like the next morning as the team boarded a plane to home, expecting to hear what happened to the plane before we left.

We didn’t.

That was 515 days ago. And, the missing flight remains one of aviation’s biggest mysteries.

But, now there’s something.

I’ve been anxiously tracking the story since I heard last week that wreckage had been found. Only an hour ago, I heard that it has been confirmed; it’s from the missing plane that went down that day.

The answers we thought we’d get before we left Beijing on March 9th, 2014 may never come. But, it’s something. At least it’s something. And, we’ll keep following for more somethings because this story about a tragedy far away really isn’t that far away. We were there. We were in a plane heading to Beijing on that very day. We were there. And, we heard the cries of mothers that day in real time, not on a screen that makes it hard to feel a sense of community. We were there.