Copy
March 2020  FTL Update from Michelle Sessoms
 
Southern Spain, early March

March 30, 2020

Dear Friends,

If you have been following me on Facebook then you have heard bits and pieces of this story and were likely part of the army of prayer warriors that surrounded me in these days. If you are not on Facebook, all of this may be new to you. There were a lot of moving parts at the time and I was not able to get a formal letter out until now. This is my story of how due to the coronavirus crisis I got stuck in Senegal...and then worked to find a way out. I hope you brought a nice beverage with you as you read.

Every bit of this story is true. I just can't tell you how it happened except by the grace of God. And the petition of a thousand prayers offered up to Him.
Dakar, Senegal

The Story of How I Got Home


The borders were closing and the options I had were limited. We turned to the prayers of many, asking God to make a way.

 
It was the end of Week 3 of a 4-week-long trip with Freedom to Lead International. I had started in Kenya, followed by a personal vacation to Spain and Morocco, and was now in Senegal. We had just finished up a week of a module on Mentoring with 25 leaders from the Church of the Nazarene Africa. It was a fantastic week with these leaders. Afterwards, I was scheduled for one more week in Senegal. This final week would be an event I had been planning for months in conjunction with my South Asia and West Africa FTL colleagues. Our prayer was that this Facilitator Training Event would lay the groundwork for a new generation of The Garden Project in West Africa.
 
When my team was woken up at 2 AM on that Wednesday to be told that President Trump just issued a travel ban as a response to the coronavirus we went to work examining our options. Most of my team was already headed home, so this wouldn’t affect them. Shortly after, it also soon became clear that the travel ban wasn’t going to be a problem because the U.S. was committed to getting their people home. Of that I was sure of. Since Americans were still allowed to fly back to the United States and African countries had either no virus cases or less than five, people in Africa were not concerned. This all changed over the weekend.
 
Two days later it became obvious that we needed to cancel the Facilitator Training Event – mostly for the sake of the leaders that were supposed to be arriving from six different neighboring countries. If these leaders got stranded we didn’t have a lot of resources to help them. West Africa is unpredictable at times.
 
My South Asia colleague got out right away. He was able to change his flight and head back to his home as soon as the next plane would go out. That was a HUGE answer to prayer. This would be the beginning of many requests for prayer and then seeing God answer them.
 

However, it would be another eight days before I would get home.


When Senegal and parts of Europe began to close their borders, that's where things got especially dicey.

There are a whole lot of details that happened in these eight days. I had flights out, but they were cancelled. Twice. What followed were phone calls with airlines, conversations with the missionary community in Senegal, connections with people who knew people, and attempts to reach out to both the U.S. and Belgian embassies (my airline to Europe was Belgian). There was one particularly difficult day at the airport that consisted of scrambling for four hours – in French, a language I don’t speak - with hundreds of other people also trying to find a way out.
 

Now the borders were closed and the airport in Senegal was not allowing any planes in or out.

 
I kept hearing things like, “if you could just get to Ethiopia…or South Africa…or anywhere in Europe…we’d be able to get you home.” The problem, however, was getting OUT of Senegal.
 
One option for me was to be sent on a 12-hour bus over land to the next neighboring country of The Gambia and just hope that their borders wouldn’t close before I could fly out to…anywhere.
 
Another option – that was looking increasingly like the reality before me – was to sequester myself in Senegal for the next 4-6 weeks, potentially much longer since nobody could predict how long this international crisis would last. I figured I could just offer my services to an organization in exchange for a bed and a shower. One missionary friend offered me her French tutor and encouraged me to learn French for a month. At least that option was looking slightly better than potentially getting stuck in The Gambia for an unforseen amount of time.
 
My West African FTL colleagues – Jose and France-Lise Oliveira – as well as both of my parents never gave up on me. My mom and dad were spending hours on the phone. Jose was keeping his ear to the ground to hear anything from his Senegalese circles. My colleague John was offering up direct help on how to get cash to me that would carry me over the next several weeks. Another missionary friend who lived four hours from Dakar was offering her connections and her home if I was willing to make the trek. And many people were praying around the clock.
 
At one point, rumors started going around that despite the airport being closed there was a Delta flight coming in the middle of the night to rescue people. The problem was that nobody could find any evidence that this Delta flight actually existed. Nor could anyone figure out how one was supposed to get on this flight. When my parents called Delta agents to inquire they tried their best but even they could not confirm this flight existed. However, the nice agent told my Dad to “keep trying” because he didn’t know what would happen.
 

The rest of this story is the part that I can’t explain except by the grace of God.

 
The next morning was a Sunday. I was talking to my mom via text messages. I told her I couldn’t keep living this way – constantly on the edge of my seat hoping to find some flight or bus out of Senegal and then get disappointed and then spend whatever energy I had left to walk all over an unfamiliar town to find some food. It was exhausting and I wasn’t getting any work done. Each day was survival, getting hopes up, staying up late in the night because of trying to communicate with people from other time zones. I told her that after today I would have to make a decision – either get a flight out today, or move forward in my long term plans to stay.
 
As I was talking to my mom, my dad went back to the Delta website and he saw something. It was almost like a “blip” on the screen. It was there for a moment and then it wasn’t. It certainly wasn’t there just a few hours before. A flight direct from Senegal to JFK. Leaving in 12 hours.
 
Without much fanfare, my mom immediately got on the phone and booked me on the flight. As soon as she finished booking the flight, it disappeared from the website again.
 
Keep in mind that everyone we know in Senegal was telling us that the airports were closed. There was no confirmation that this flight actually existed (we already went down this route four days previous with the Belgian airline that never showed up despite me having not only a reservation but also a boarding pass). And this leaving-in-the-middle-of-the-night thing seemed a little clandestine. This couldn’t be real, could it?
 

All I had was blind faith. But it was enough.


We drove to the airport. This time my FTL colleague Jose accompanied me so that I would not to have to tackle the airport by myself again. We got there five hours before this flight was supposed to leave and it was dark. The airport is fairly new and is located in the middle of nowhere anyway, but even as we drove to the entrance it looked deserted. I told Jose that until I was met with a locked door, I was going to keep going. In blind faith or in desperation, it didn’t matter.
 
The door was unlocked and when I opened it I saw a sea of hundreds of people in a line six rows deep. We were still five hours from the flight and it was already a madhouse. There were six security checkpoints. Jose stayed until I was past the first three and then offered me his local SIM card to keep in touch until I got on the plane. At one security checkpoint they said they couldn’t find my reservation. I kept going anyway. At the counter, they typed my information into the computer for what seemed like an eternity. The reservation was found only because my mom had used my credit card instead of hers when she booked me and at the counter I had proof of the card in my hand.

Boarding passes were issued, and I went through about three more security checks. However, I wasn’t going to get my hopes up about any of this until I was on the plane and we had exited Senegalese airspace. Even then I hadn’t really processed any of what had just happened. It was all a little surreal. Just before takeoff, the head flight attendant told us that this was indeed a “rescue flight.” I still didn’t know what that meant or how I got there.
 
About 9 or 10 hours later we landed in JFK. The plane erupted in cheers when wheels touched ground. Entering the airport, however, was like a entering a ghost town. At customs a group of us was flagged and we had to go into this tiny room. Because it was New York they weren’t messing around. We all had short connecting flights, but didn’t want to show impatience because that would have only made things worse. We all knew that collectively I think, but the tension was really thick in that tiny room with about 20 of my new best friends. They took our temperature, they asked us lots of questions, then called us up one by one. I had to make an account of everywhere I’d been over the past 30 days.
 
I hadn’t done the math until that point. But it had been exactly 15 days since I left Spain. At that point, Spain was considered the epicenter of the virus. I’m not sure what would have happened if it were less than 15 days since I’d been there. But I didn’t ask any questions and they let me go.
 
I’ve never seen an airport so deserted. It was kind of an eerie feeling. I had only heard of all that was going on in the U.S. on the news. This was my first time experiencing it. I looked on the monitor to find my gate and all I could see was “cancelled, cancelled, cancelled, cancelled.” About 85% of flights were cancelled. Raleigh-Durham was one of the few flights that was still flying. There were ten people on my flight. The pilot told us before takeoff that we were in for quite a bumpy ride and he wasn’t kidding around. Dude. But at that point I didn’t even care. I was going home.
 
We landed in Raleigh, I got my bag, and met my mom’s car at the curbside. Up until that point – for the past eight days – I had done a pretty good job of keeping myself together. But as soon as I saw my mom the tears began flowing. And they would not stop.
 
Today it is a week later. Over the past week I have slowly started telling my story to small groups of people. A lot of it comes out all jumbled. A lot of it I can’t tell without catching my breath. Much of it I am still processing, especially when I know of people in similar situations that were not able to get out and are still in a place of “waiting.” I’ve woken up every night since coming home in cold sweats. But mostly I’ve just been sitting here thinking, “it’s all going to be okay, thank you Jesus.”
 

And I can testify that a whole ARMY of people showed up and prayed for me.


I shared on Facebook and sent a few emails and SO many people from a great variety of places and spaces of my life showed up and prayed. I believe with all my heart that God answered all of your prayers in very specific ways. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to truly thank you. But, thank you. Thank you for showing up and praying. 
 
And thank you for asking me to tell this story.
 
Somewhere along this journey I shared these words with my community. I believe these words just as strongly now as I did then:

 

These are uncertain times. We don’t know how this story ends.
But we know the One who does.

 
May God encourage your hearts today.

 
 

It is my responsibility to form a team of ministry partners who will support Freedom To Lead with monthly gifts and prayers. Please continue to pray how you might be involved to financially support the ministry of Freedom To Lead.

Make a Contribution Toward The Ministry of Freedom to Lead!


1.  To give by check:
Make checks payable to “Freedom to Lead."
Please put my name (Michelle Sessoms) on the memo line.
Then, send to:

Freedom to Lead
P.O. Box 3
Cary, NC 27512

 

*the same applies when setting up an automatic bank draft from your bank

2.  To give online: Visit www.freedomtolead.net/donate
 

Copyright © 2020 Freedom to Lead International, All rights reserved.


unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences