Mariana van Zeller

Yeah.

And how they don't know until the last minute if they're going to leave or not.

It was exactly that situation.

So we get to the airport in the middle of the night.

So they told us that we had to be at the airport at this time, that we had to take security with us because the pilot was refusing to land unless we had security there, police.

The police was supposed to show up.

They never did.

We arrive at the airport.

It's sunrise and the military is there waiting for us.

Yeah, it's one of those.

And they start creating all sorts of problems saying we don't have the right paperwork.

They're not going to let us leave.

meanwhile there was this amazing man local man who worked at the airport that I'd met a few days before when I went there to try to see if there's any plane leaving let us know and so I stayed in touch with him and I had told him that it was my son's birthday which was partially not true it wasn't his birthday but he was about to leave camp and I've got this tradition as a working mother who travels all the time we have this tradition that I always pick him up from camp and it's

performing arts camp.

And so I told him, sorry, this is a very long story.

So I told him, you know, so he was there to help us, but the military was also there and they didn't want us to leave and creating all sorts of problems.

And then we see the plane land and we see the pilot come out and we see the military start...

walking towards the pilot to tell them that we didn't have the permission to leave.

And my fear was that the pilot was immediately going to turn around because he had told us that we had 20 minutes.

He was going to spend 20 minutes on the ground, and if we couldn't get into the plane, he was going to leave without us.