April 16, 2022

I forgot to mention this in the last post.  When I walked away from Tatiana, Natalie, and Sergei, I looked at the credit card slip.  I converted zlotys to dollars:  tickets for two people, on two different trains, a total of four tickets, was $40.  

Type of Wood team chat shared an update that now people without passport stamps could get a free ticket and where to take them in the train station to get whatever was necessary for them to get a ticket.

I met up with Rob Sturgill, head of Type of Wood, for the first time, also meeting some of the other team members.  Very nice folks.

Rob told me the origin story of the name, Type of Wood.

In 2014 they went on their first humanitarian mission, to the Philippines, to rebuild houses in the wake of a big typhoon.  The local wood is coconut wood, and once it dries, it is very hard to drive nails into.

Rob is working alongside a Filipino contractor to whom he says, this wood is almost impossible to work with, I’m used to pine or something much easier to work with.

The contractor smile, shrugged, and said “Type of wood”.

Rob said it struck him immediately that this had a particular meaning.  That God puts obstacles in the way when you are trying to help others, and that you are not to focus on the obstacles, complain or be put off, take it personally, you focus on the people you are trying to help, and keep going until you succeed.  The obstacles are always going to be there, they are inherent in every situation, laugh it off.

A lovely story, a nice companion for the journey here, with the magnitude of the situation, the level of need, everywhere.

In the hard to laugh off department, a convoy of ten tanks on flatbed trucks passed me on the highway.

After dropping these two fellows at the train station in Krakow, I took the rest of group about an hour further up the A4 highway to Katowice, to the train station there.

Apple Maps started acting funny near the train station in Katowice, it kept re-routing and re-routing us.  I parked where it said the train station was.  No train station. I called Rob, to see if anyone on the team had been to Katowice train station, and could help us out.

He said no one had, but to drop a GPS pin if I found it to make it easier for the next folks.

So here I am with these people looking at me anxiously. I hop out, to grab a passerby, hoping they would speak English, or we could use Google Translate to find the train station.

Good fortune, God, something, comes to make things a bit easier, and the woman does speak English.  She says we are at the back entrance to the train station, pointing across the street to what would not be easily recognized as an entrance.  The woman says that the streets are such that it would be hard to drive to the front entrance, it would be best to park here, walk in and find our way from there.

She said I should ‘take your refugees and go that way’ with a warm smile.

The twin boys both shake my hand and rather solemnly say thank you.  I wondered if they were now the men of the family.

The day before I left for Poland I picked my four year old grandson up from preschool.  He said I found this for you.

Now I recognize a lucky talisman when it is offered to me, I knew it was going to keep me and all my passengers safe through all our travels.  

My grandson was told I was going to be far away for a little while, and I wouldn’t be there for Easter or the Easter egg hunt. He suggested I could just come back for the day.  His mom told him I was too far away, I was taking an airplane.  He then asked if I would be piloting the plane.  

I think I feel his sweetness, his trusting vulnerability when I am at the refugee center and my heart aches.

Some other vulnerable trusting little boy left his Spider-Man on the sink in the lavatory in the refugee center.  Even though they are cleaned multiple times a day, the lavatories are dirty and smell terrible.  They are just not meant to handle so many people.

I felt the twin boys were saying we put our trust and vulnerability in your hands and you got us to the train station.