A happy and sad and finally happy story developed early last week in the lead up to Christmas Day.
We got a call from one of the United Airlines flight attendants during their stay at RRE Hotel in between flights to and from Guam/Honolulu.
Long story short, the UA flight attendants had brought lots of Christmas gifts and were going to raise the spirits of a lot of patients at Majuro hospital by distributing the gifts that same afternoon. The request: Could the Journal be on hand to take photos and give them some publicity.
Sure, we responded, it’s the sort of thing we like to do and UA flight attendants delivering gifts to Majuro hospital is a new development.
Usually its local groups, church/youth/business groups that get organized and sing and deliver gifts to patients at Christmas time.
Following the call, a Journal photographer get assigned to the job. All good and the Journal team goes about its work.
Then, sometime after the 4pm time for the gift deliveries, the Journal editor receives a sad email from the photographer explaining that he’s the victim a flat tire by Peace Park and doesn’t have a spare tire in the (rental) car. So he couldn’t get to the hospital on time.
Thereafter, he begins asking everyone for a photo of this momentous UA flight attendant donation and well, he had gone through a pretty long check list of people and either they weren’t there or didn’t take photos.
He went nurse to nurse to see if any took photos. “How many did you ask?” we wondered. His answer: “Bwijen.” (Translation: A lot).
And guess what? Kijenmej (otherwise known as persistence) paid off. He located hospital nurse Sayuri Tajima who had taken photos of the gift delivery, giving us visual confirmation of the United Airlines flight attendants delivering gifts to Majuro hospital patients and staff last week.