It was 6 am in the rainy Brussels airport. In the past two months, I had traveled from Buenos Aires to Durham, Durham to Costa Rica, Costa Rica to Washington DC, DC to Durham, Durham to Richmond, Richmond to DC and DC to Brussels - and I suppose I should have been exhausted, but I wasn’t. I was wide eyed and focused. After all, I had a mission: to switch seats with someone on the plane who had a window seat. I was going to be flying over Africa for the first time, and I needed a window.
As we boarded the plane and I took my aisle seat, I looked anxiously at the arriving passengers for the person who would switch seats with me. Would it be one of the Guatemalan nuns? The young nurse from Boston? The National Geographic-looking guy? Or perhaps one of the many Canadian-passport clutching Rwandans that I saw? No, it would be Beatrice from Burundi. Agreeing to switch seats was one of the first of many non-verbal communications we would have over that 8 hour flight. She spoke French and I spoke English, but we were both fluent in smiling, nodding, and pointing.
At first my intention to see Africa from above was frustrated by clouds, but then, the bright white below began to fade away into rolling expanses of tawny brown and smears of black cutting across the landscape. The Sahara desert: all feminine and fierce. I began to search for blue, for water, for signs of life, but 30,000 feet above didn’t reveal any of those things. It continued like this until just before dusk, when I became aware that we were flying over the Nile River. Below us the sky had turned to a soft charcoal blue with the late afternoon as if all of the Nile’s H2O components were mixing with the atmosphere. And then, with the brief burst of an electric sunset, the sky and everything below went black. But completely black. I saw no hazy orange skylines, no slow moving highways, no neighborhoods ribbed in street lights. It was night, completely.
This visual silence could have been disconcerting, but it left me feeling peaceful. (The same feeling I now get walking through the dark hills of the neighborhood I live in. Walking beside a sure-footed companion, my vision is more limited that I am accustomed to, but I trust my feet to carry me.)
As we neared our destination in Kigali, lights began to dot the space below. Hills began to rise up above the wings of the plane, and suddenly we felt the ground below the wheels. As I descended the plane, greeted by tall, serious-faced Rwandan airport employees in reflective gear, I took a deep breath, giving thanks for Africa arriving.
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