Kansas mother and daughter back home after conflict in Iran strands them in the Middle East
By Pilar Pedraza
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WICHITA, Kan. (KAKE) — A Kansas woman who was among hundreds of thousands of Americans stranded in the Middle East by the ongoing conflict with Iran is now back home in Wichita.
“I had friends waiting (for my arrival), and it was very heartwarming, heartwarming to know that they were there,” Heather Gibbs said about her return to the U.S. after being stuck in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for a week.
The missiles flying from the U.S and Israel on one side and Iran on the other, beginning in late February, closed most air space in the Middle East and trapped anywhere from 550,000 to a million Americans in several countries throughout the region.
Heather Gibbs and her mother, Martha Fair, were among them. A retired teacher from Wichita, Gibbs was on vacation in the UAE when the bombing started.
“We were there on vacation to see some friends, as well as sightsee,” Gibbs said. “That was my dream destination.”
She said the UAE government provided them with safe shelter while they were trying to get back home. They filled out all the State Department emergency forms, but say they got little help from the U.S. government.
“What’s heartbreaking to us is that our government was promising that we were going to get to the United States. That was not a promise that they were keeping,” Gibbs said.
She says charter flights to the U.S. left without them, often before she and her mother even knew the flights existed.
“It’s kind of like a lottery system. I don’t know how they picked. I have no idea,” she said.
Then, she said, they got offers from the State Department to be evacuated to other countries, specifically Turkey and Greece.
“(But,) we had to pay our own way to the United States (from there),” she said. That’s not what she felt the government had promised to do. “And we said, ‘No.'”
Gibbs and her mother had booked the trip through a travel agency and say that’s what eventually got them home. The agency managed to find them a new flight, on a diffferent airline, without charging the two any more than they’d already spent.
The flight home, though, provided even more worry for the few friends who knew Gibbs and Fair were on board.
They were watching the flight’s progress via an online tracker and saw it deviate from the planned flight path.
“They thought we were hijacked because it diverted. And so they had no idea exactly what had happened…until we got to Toronto,” Gibbs said.
From her perspective, the flight had been uneventful.
The experience, she added, has changed her view of what matters in life.
“This was not on my BINGO card to be stuck, but it’s…it is an experience. It’s been a learning experience on so many levels.”
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