Elsewhere

I’m not in Tiny Little Town at the moment. I’m Elsewhere. Elsewhere is bigger than TLT. There are trees! And slopes! TLT is so very flat and bare. I had forgotten how much more interesting the world is when the ground goes up and down instead of just flat forever. Although all that flat does make for some amazing sunsets. The sky is most of the world.

Elsewhere is also not as hot as TLT and it’s not a swamp, so there is less mud and there are fewer bugs. I can wear a skirt. I feel almost, I don’t know, normal again, instead of constantly sweaty and dirty. I went for a walk last night with a colleague from another of my organization’s office, to look for some shower slippers (this means flipflops – I’ve been wearing my tevas in the shower and they never ever dry. yuck). Elsewhere feels like the Africa I know. The earth is red instead of gray clay. There are flowers. There are motorcycle taxis. There are shops, and they sell actual items, like juice and combs. Kids march along carrying water cans, all businesslike. “How are you?!” one called in English as I passed.

At night, although the bathrooms are still separate and you can’t sit down, I realized what a difference light makes. I can get up here, and go to the bathroom, because there is a light in the bathroom and there are people around. You don’t even want to know how this goes in TLT.

…

Getting to Elsewhere was a feat. It rained the night before, all night, and in the morning we had to make periodic updates on the status of the airstrip. Finally another plane came, for another set of people, and swooped low over the runway once, and again, and then climbed high into the sky and disappeared, leaving its potential passengers cursing on the ground. We immediately called our plane, piled into the car, and set off for the next closest airstrip, which is much better kept up and mostly impervious to the weather because it’s on high(er) ground.

Halfway to the other airstrip, we hit a patch of slippery mud and careened off the road. I was sitting mashed in the middle of the front seat, without a seatbelt because the seatbelts don’t work, and I had time to grab the handle on the dashboard and hope that we stopped before we landed in the deep watery part of the swamp that lines the road. I was worried about my luggage, NOT the people in the car, as would have been the logical worry. Would my books survive a swamp-dunking? We did stop before the water, and without rolling over, and we all clambered out of the car and up onto the road to survey the damage. The visiting white people hugged each other as if they thought they had barely escaped death, which made me laugh because we had actually been going less than 50 kilometers an hour. The car sat at a 45 degree angle, wheels a foot deep in the mud. We dared not try to push it out, lest it should roll on us, and there was no way that even low four-wheel drive was going to get that car out on its own.

Fortunately, right when we were about to call the plane people and tell them that we weren’t going to make it, Oxfam happened by and rescued us. Their Land Cruiser slipped and slid around the road, but succeeded in pulling ours out of the ditch. We continued on, a bit muddier and a bit later. We saw another car in the same situation, but with an additional dead battery, and then two huge trucks. One slid off the road as we watched, as it attempted to pull the other out. It was like a Michigan highway in a blizzard, except with better visibility. That last truck blocked the road almost completely, and we all piled out of our car again and watched as it inched its way past the truck, now nearly in the water, now nearly hitting the truck as it slid around. We would not have dared try it at all if another truck had not happened by just then, on the side where we needed to go, and offered to pull us out if we got stuck. We continued on again, still muddier and still later.

We were a half hour late to the airstrip, and the other passengers were sitting on the ground under the wing, waiting for us. For the last twenty kilometers, we had to sit in perfect silence in the front seat, because it turns out that the guy who was driving? He’s very outgoing, and he cannot talk to or listen to someone speak without looking at them. And therefore not at the road. Which is nerve-wracking in slippery circumstances. Following several attempts by one of us to speak, each completed by a “Watch the ROAD!,” I finally said, after mistakenly making yet another comment, “STOP LOOKING AT ME!” (That made me laugh particularly hard because I used to work with emotionally impaired kids, and some of them screamed that from the corner every time your eyes so much as passed over them.)

…

Things that do not inspire confidence when sitting in the copilot’s seat of a single-prop plane (I know! We were too many, so the pilot let me sit there!):

1. No run-through of the safety checklist.
2. Not one word to air-traffic control.
3. The half-empty water bottles rolling around under his seat.
4. The same pilot, without a break or a meal, does five trips in a row, adding up to about fourteen hours of flying. In one day. Without a copilot.
5. Loud alarms go off periodically. The pilot ignores them.
6. The pilot gets out a hand-held GPS, then digs around under his seat for a while, finally pulling out a tattered plastic folder and then an old piece of paper. He looks up the town you are going to and enters it into the GPS by hand, sighs, and changes some settings on the navigation system.
7. The prop’s RPMs are firmly in the red zone for much of the flight.
8. Not only does the pilot not tell you to turn off mobile phones, he writes and sends text messages on a sat phone while flying the plane. I watched the altitude drop rapidly as he tapped away on the phone. When he was finished, he pulled back on the, er, whatever you call that horse-shoe shaped thing, and we ascended again. Also, he almost ran us off the taxiway after we landed because, again, he was writing text messages.