Stephanie Mast
speaker
221 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Stephanie Mast’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And she personally, Joshua, was talking to her. And he's like, I've got a group. There are visas. It's been verified. They can get through. And she's like, well, the Australians are not here. And he's like, well, wouldn't it be a shame if 14 people can't get through because the Australians aren't here? And so she – go ahead.
Entire family units.
get back to the states like 12 hours before they did how did you find them though that was a minor miracle as well so um you were there too stephanie yeah we did yeah i went with him that wasn't the plan like i said we were it was just very responsive as to what was going on um i at the time my our youngest son was nine months old i was still nursing at the time so it was when josh was like we're gonna have to go because we don't know where in the world she's going
and were her adoptive parents. And so we both need to be there to be present. So I literally gave my nine-month-old baby to my sister, which she's, I mean, like a second mom to him anyway. So I gave, I handed him over and we drove up to Baltimore to fly out to Ramstein. And I remember asking Joshua, At the point, we were like, we didn't know where in the world they were going, like he said.
And so he was on the phone with someone at the control tower at Qatar and reading off where all the places were going. And I remember asking him, I was like, if we fly all the way to Germany, and what if they're not there? I mean, like, what's our family? We're going to look like idiots if we fly across the world. And then it's the wrong guess. And he's like, he's an educated guess.
He's like, God's brought us this far. We're just going to go for it and see, you know, basically. see what happens. And so we did. We boarded the flight and we flew to Germany and landed within an hour of each other.
We walked like 50 miles in a matter of a couple days.
Yeah, so it was very spotty. But they had to be very close. Yeah, they had a phone. And whenever there was Wi-Fi, they would connect.
We were together. Yeah, we were. And they brought her out. And so at that point, we were still in the impression, based on what we were told, that she may not be able—she couldn't walk. And so they carried her out. And I was sitting on a bench, and they set her—they were holding her at first, and then they set her down so that we could see her.
And that was when I first—like I said, she was so turned in where she would barely look out. She would kind of look up, and her eyes— She has really big, we joke that's like Jasmine, like Princess Jasmine. She has these big eyes, but her eyes were very closed off and she looked like a furrowed brow. And to the point where, like I said earlier, I was like, is that her?
Because her hair was short and just like straw-like and she was just like- Too sick as dogs. Yeah, just dark circles under her eyes and very, you know, she's thin. And I was shocked. And then when I saw, like when she's sitting on the woman's lap, I saw the scar on her leg and I was like, That's her. And so they set her down beside me and we took a photo and I have my hand on her back.
And the reason why I had my hand on her back is just like any young child where you're afraid like they're tippy or they're going to fall back. I had my hand on her back to make sure to stabilize her. And then she got down and she walked over. And in that moment, I was like, because in my mind, we're still operating from the information we had 18 months prior. medically disabled. So I was shocked.
I was like, she's walking. I kind of looked at Joshua like, man, she kind of tottered. Yeah, she tottered. But it was such a relief to know that she could even walk at that point because we knew the injuries in her leg. I was just like, wow, she can walk.
And so that first moment, it was like at first it was disbelief, but then it was just relief to see that she can walk, she's alive, and this is actually her and we're here. And that was just a culmination of all of these highs and lows. And like Joshua said, even though this is a long interview, it's— There's so much emotion in like any good story. There's triumphs and there's failures.
There's heroes, there's villains. And we've like through this experience have had all of that. And so in that moment, even with meeting them for the first time, there was such joy and relief. And it was just like, we made it to this moment.
And really we just, we did then what we were planning to do all along. We just poured everything into her.
And so medical, like, I mean, I don't know how many times I went up to Duke and Raleigh and medical appointment after medical appointment, like from just a few days in, just went down the line, everything that we had planned 18 months prior or what, 18 months or more prior, we immediately executed and went down the line and just,
started to just kind of get a gauge of, okay, where is she at physically, emotionally, just across the board and just poured into her. Yeah.
I didn't even realize that she didn't smile until a couple weeks in, and it was something, and you mentioned, she's like, oh, look, she's smiling. And it took a while for her, like, her face is now to today, her face is like her baby photos. It's like any child where when you look at their baby photos, you're like, oh, I can see, like, I can see the way they look as a kid. You can see it back then.
And so... her face is back to the way she was as a baby, where big eyes, open, very expressive when she talks. But it took, it was like layers of an onion. It took time for that child to reemerge.
Showing 101–120 of 221 · page 6 of 12
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