Sometime Friday night, November 2

Who would have thought our presence would be so unwelcome? And after all the fun of filling out a permit with everyone’s personal information and submitting it to FEMA (thanks to Miriam, sister of Moses, for helping us navigate that process---I hope she gets a break from helping the folks in California) and then onto Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) who granted the permit and our paroles to enter the county.

Parole, what an interesting description for a group of people who fund-raised for 4 months, gave a week of their holidays and gave up time with their families to go and help their neighbours in New Orleans. I guess we comprise a new class of criminal element, volunteers.

So, we got paroled. Eventually. The powers that be at Port Huron CBP had the file immediately but that wasn’t good enough for them. We would all have to be processed individually. It could take an hour per person, and there had best not be anything in our past that would make them want to keep us out. But, gotta play by the rules of the game when it’s their park, right? One agent understood someone was doing a number on us, and kept things light, but still, the possibility of spending the night in their office was not, well, appealing. We called Miriam, and an hour later the power that was came to the agents and said more would be assigned to our bus and we were to be out of there in 30 minutes. They didn’t quite achieve their goal but we only spent 3 hours with CBP, instead of the projected 14. All of us kept our cool and were gracious, doing our best “Paul Gross as a Mounty” imitations.