Europe on 5-10 Nervous Breakdowns a Day (42)

DAY 52 – SUNDAY, JUNE 16, 1974 – BUT WHY DID THEY ARREST MY DAUGHTER?

I was still awake when we stopped at Jakarta, Indonesia. Debbie and I got off to stretch our legs. It was hot and humid. That would be the last warm weather we would experience for a while. It was already wintertime in Sydney.

From Jakarta, it was a six-hour flight to Sydney. I read a while and then they set up a buffet in the back of the plane. People were still awake and visiting. The last reading light didn’t go off until 7:00 a.m. Sydney time. I rested a bit, but if I ever went to sleep I wasn’t aware of it.

We had breakfast about 9:30 and then I stood in a queue to clean up and shave.

I kept thinking about our church family at Macquarie studying and worshipping that morning.

At 11:15, we started descending. It would take us awhile to collect our luggage and go through quarantine and customs, but we would then call someone at the church building to come get us.

We had made a complete circuit around the earth—from Sydney to Oklahoma, to London, and then through Europe and Asia back to Sydney. Jules Verne’s hero made it around the world in eighty days, but it had taken us six months.

We were a tad apprehensive about getting back into our hectic schedules but were looking forward to being home.

My notes close as the red-tiled roofs of Sydney came into view: “I can just see our ‘rose city.’”

The end of the story?

Not quite.

When we were getting ready to leave Sydney six months earlier, the doctor wouldn’t give Cindy a smallpox shot because she had eczema. We had a note to explain this. It took a little extra time when we went through customs, but had not been a problem on our travels. Not until we got back to Sydney.

As our family was going through the line to get back into the country, an official asked us to follow him. He put us in a room and left. We sat there, wondering what was going on. Two men came in, looking very serious. They said Cindy would have to be quarantined for two weeks because we had gone through “a smallpox area.” (A case of smallpox had been reported in one of the places on our homeward trip. Hong Kong? New Delhi? London?)

The only way I know to describe the procedure they went through is to say that it was basically what I had seen on TV when people were arrested—everything except the handcuffs. The men had Cindy stand, reeled off a memorized spiel, then took her by the arm and marched her away—leaving us sitting there flabbergasted.

As far as Jo was concerned, this was the last straw. She had endured traveling for almost two months, trying to keep our clothes clean while much of the time she couldn’t understand what other people were saying. She had been desperately holding on until we got back home, back home to familiar and friendly surroundings. But just as she thought she was safe, they had taken her first-born, her beloved Cindy, away. She burst into tears and cried, “They don’t want us here! Let’s catch the next plane back to America!”

EPILOGUE

Many years earlier, when people came to Australia on ships instead of planes, they had built a large quarantine station on the North Head of Sydney Harbor. They often had to quarantine entire shiploads of people there. The station had been closed for years, but that is where they took Cindy. In addition to a cook, a maintenance man, and others, she had two nurses assigned to her. She was the only detainee there. Since Pan Am had allowed her to fly despite our having been in “a smallpox area,” they had to foot the bill. ($800.00 U.S., if I remember correctly.)

Cindy ended up enjoying the experience. She was treated like a VIP. She made her own menu. She went for long walks on the beach. She had unlimited phone privileges to talk to her friends. We took material and a sewing machine to her (handed them over the gate to the maintenance man) and she made a school uniform.

Two weeks from the time she had been detained, on a Sunday after the morning service, she was brought to our church building in a limousine. All of her friends were there to greet her. She was embarrassed by the attention, but was finally home. And our family was again united.

The rest of us were already trying to catch up after being gone six months. I put my notes in my files and got my slides developed and ready for use in my classes. I even used some of them in two sermons on “God, Man, and the Continuing Challenge.” When I did the final figuring on our expenses, as best I could tell, we had saved our work funds more than $300.00 compared to what it would have cost to fly to Oklahoma and then straight back to Sydney

Our trip had been the experience of a lifetime—with its good and not-so-good moments. I had not taught in the two Bible training schools as expected, but I had done some serious research and I had preached in England, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and Scotland. But now it was time to get back to “real life.”