Secret Furlough to Madison

Greetings everyone,

As several readers of this blog may know, many families in the Madison community gave me the greatest gift someone can receive during the holidays.  They supplied me with the opportunity to travel to my hometown to spend the holiday season with family and friends.  What started as an altruistic endeavor by Lori Meicher, a long time, close family friend and mother of one of my best friends, transcended into something magical for my entire family.

In early December, Lori contacted me through a facebook message which stated that she had just listened to the Christmas classic song, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and she proceeded to have a grand idea about how fantastic it would be to bring me back to Madison for the holidays.  Upon reading the message, I was completely open to the idea but I didn’t think something like this was feasible since the price of airline tickets around the holiday season are dreadfully high and the fact that we only had a few weeks to get everything organized.  Since I did not have enough discretionary income to finance a plane ride home for the holidays, I was very content with just video-chatting with people while they were together in Wisconsin. 

On the same early December day that I received the message, I called Lori’s cell phone to discuss her intriguing proposal.  Hypothetically, she planned to ask people in our community if they would be willing to donate money to the cause and she felt confident that she could raise enough funds.  Through a self-assured certitude that she could convince people to assist her with her generous aspirations, Lori ordered the plane tickets for a roundtrip flight from Dominica to Madison for the holidays.  After about a week, Lori collected enough resources to fund the entire operation with an extra sum of money to provide children of my village with holiday gifts.

Another aspect of this ambitious idea was to completely surprise my family members about my presence in Madison.  Lori, being the “evil genius” (I dubbed her that during all of this) that she is, organized a Christmas party at her house for the evening after I arrived in Madison.  She concocted a fictitious invitation which was only sent to my family alerting them of the Christmas party.  The rest of the invited guests were contacted through email as they were “in the know” about the plan to surprise my family with my arrival. 

One major, unforeseeable issue arose as Lori and I were planning this.  My mom was arranging to send me a gift package for the holidays.  As Lori and I wanted to save my mom several hundred dollars in mailing fees, we developed a story to halt my mom from sending the package since I would be in Madison.

Lori made up a quite believable plot (once again, an evil genius at work) and I executed it with precision.  She told me to let my mom know that locals have informed me that packages should not be sent during the holiday period since the high volume of expensive items lead to an increase in theft and “lost” packages at the post office.  After I emailed my mom the fabricated story, my mom immediately replied with a message that said how she is going to use Fed Ex and that Fed Ex is guaranteed.  Upon seeing her response, I instantaneously answered with an angry toned, rude email that told her Fed Ex is not to be trusted as well and that I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t able to listen to me about topics she doesn’t understand.  She wrote me back very apologetically and said she would wait until after the holiday season to send me the package.  Lori and I snickered about her replies as we knew my mom believed me.  After a convincing video-chatting session with my family just days prior to traveling to Madison, we knew that they wouldn’t suspect anything.

The party the Meicher’s hosted at their house was filled with nearly one hundred people who are dear friends to my family in Madison.  All of the people in attendance and many who donated to the cause who couldn’t make it to the occasion successfully withheld the information from my parents and brothers.  When my family arrived at the party, people concealed me until my mom was in the center of the room.  When I was “unveiled” and she noticed I was standing in the corner of the kitchen, she immediately “Clay Matthew’d” me with a giant hug and she began to cry.

With being reunited in person with family and close friends, the Christmas party at the Meicher’s house felt like I was inside a moment of a movie during a heartfelt scene.  It was one of those beautiful moments that I will be able to look back fondly on for years to come.  By the way, the food tasted outstanding too.  :)

I hung out around Madison for the past few weeks visiting with close friends and family.  I joked with people telling them that I felt like a “professional socializer” while I bounced around the city seeing many familiar faces during all instances of the days.  I felt immensely wonderful as I quickly got used to hanging around everyone in Madison again.  I am quite fortunate that I've sustained so many close relationships even though I have been away for a decently long duration of time.  Although I have lived somewhere else for a year, it felt like I didn’t “skip a beat” with almost everyone who spent time with me. 

I genuinely thank everyone who was part of Lori’s plan to allow me the opportunity to see the people from my hometown who I care about in person.  The selfless unity we have in our community is quite remarkable to observe and I feel very honored and proud to be alongside everyone.  This is truly one of the most memorable Christmas seasons I’ve encountered during my life. 

Also, thank you to the people who made time for me while I was back in the United States.  I’m glad you were all able to squeeze me into your busy holiday schedules.  You all are sincerely a major inspiration to me more than you all know.  :)

Until the next time,

Joe

P.S.  New pictures were added from my vacation.  My mother’s faces in the surprise party photos are priceless.

P.P.S.  Upon arriving back on Dominica, the weather was 90 degrees and sunny ;)