The lost suitcase surprise is coming to a close. We had great news from JetBlue. The lost suitcase claim finished processing and the Kasongos will be paid about $1200 for their lost suitcase, which will be very helpful for them! It’s surprising how much it costs to replace everything in a large suitcase, but it certainly adds up as you start itemizing the price of each item.
Now I think about what it took to make the claim on the lost luggage – there’s no way they could have done that on their own without speaking English or having a tremendous amount of persistence and a Swahili or maybe French interpreter. It took several calls from me to Jet Blue and South African Airlines. Then, receiving a form via email and filling out a line by line list of everything that was in the suitcase. Completing the form was a challenge since the Kasongo’s knew the names of items in Swahili or French, but needed to write in English. The key to solving this was getting a picture Swahili to English dictionary. After showing how to complete about 10 items, I left it with them to do the rest. A few days later, they had a good 10 pages of items listed – 1/6th of everything they owned when arriving in America. I scanned and uploaded the form to JetBlue, only to find out a few weeks later that the paper had never been received and I sent it in again – this time by mail and internet. Finally, some 4 months after they arrived in the US missing a suitcase, it has reached a resolution as they signed an acceptance to the offer letter yesterday.
Returning this form also proved to be a valuable teaching experience as I had them address the envelop themselves. It took some explaining about where they should write the “To” information and the “From” information and where to put the stamp and even what consisted of a stamp vs. the adhesive part of the stamps that were not actually the stamp. It’s little things like how to send a letter that I don’t even think about in helping a refugee, but are so foreign when coming from a 3rd world rural country full of violence with poor infrastructure and likely very poor government entities. I have no idea how mail travels in their country, but would guess it doesn’t happen very well.