Back from Africa

Non-Fiction
Written by Erin in November 2008


It was somewhere over Egypt that I opened my eyes and stopped my attempt at sleep. When we changed planes in Ethiopia, about five new parents had received their adopted babies, and they had all somehow managed to congregate near the middle of the plane where I was seated. It was like any other plane: unstable pullout table, phone booth bathrooms, and uncomfortable chairs. The only way of reaching slight comfort was to be privileged enough to have a window seat. I didn’t have a window seat. My neck hurt from trying to sleep upright; my head bobbled back and forth. Air flowed through a small, circular vent above me, and I turned it off to keep myself from freezing. I asked a flight attendant for a blanket and she came back with a very thin cloth that read Ethiopian Airlines. A large woman was sitting a few rows behind me and couldn’t keep her children quiet. The children cried and complained about how the seats were uncomfortable. The large woman threatened to spank them the entire trip back to the States. My friend Elizabeth sat next to me, sleeping soundly next to the window.
I continued to look back at the large woman and her children, but she took no notice of anyone else on the plane. I rolled my eyes and whispered to my other friend, Jonathan, who was seated nearby playing cards. “I can’t go to sleep,” I said, pointing to the large woman in the back.
“Yeah, I gave up on that a long time ago,” he laughed. “Wanna play cards? There’s a free seat over here.”
“No thanks,” I replied. “Maybe I’ll fall asleep if I watch a movie.”
“Good idea.”
The small TV flickered in front of me. There was a digital map of the plane flying over the Mediterranean Sea. I leaned over to look out the window. It was dark. I searched through the seven channels and thought that it was odd to see American movies on the screen again. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, we had a small TV that played French cartoons and awful Swahili music videos. My friends and I would sit around the TV early on Thursday mornings, after our breakfast of tea, bread, butter, jam, and cheese. Thursdays were our free day, our weekend. We sat around the TV, intently watching the cartoons. We couldn’t understand anything apart from bonjour and merci, but we got the general idea. When the cartoons went off, the Swahili music videos began. Many of them were similar and looked like they had been filmed with a home video camera. The videos consisted of bad lip syncing, tropical backgrounds, and dizzying camera movements. They played constantly throughout the day. One night my friends and I had eaten dinner later than usual when suddenly American music videos appeared on the television. We ran from the table and watched as if to soak in our American pop culture. We had watched Congolese television for the past two months, and we were ready for the better quality. But I wasn’t sure if it was right of me to want it so quickly. After I chose a movie, I realized that I was headed home and knew that I wouldn’t be back for a long time.
By the time I finished the movie, we had landed in Italy to re-fuel. We all sat in the plane for the next forty-five minutes, waiting. I tried to sleep but not five minutes had gone by when the attendants began offering us small covered plates of Ethiopian plane food. One of the attendants was repeatedly nudging me, and I woke up to find the clear, covered plate in front of me. Square yellow bread and cheese was in one space of the tray, while a spicy meat roll and normal green salad was in another. “What to drink?” she asked dumbly, as though she had done nothing to disturb me. Food was obviously more important than sleep. I wanted so much to yell at her, saying that I didn’t want the food, that all I wanted was thirty minutes of rest. But I was nice and told her that I wanted the apple juice. I usually took the food even if I wasn’t hungry, just to have something to do. I ate out of boredom.
As we sat in the plane eating the food, a group of Ethiopian girls, all wearing the same bright blue windbreakers, did back-bends for some of the passengers. The adults who were accompanying them were telling the nearby passengers why they were traveling to America. They were a gymnast team competing in a competition somewhere in America. The man talked for a long time.
When the plane took off again, I went to the telephone booth-sized bathroom to brush my teeth. There was a line of little girls. I finally got to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and went back to my seat, putting on my headphones. We were soon flying over the Atlantic Ocean, something familiar.
When we reached Washington, D.C., I whispered to Jonathan again.
“How long have we been awake?”
He counted in his head for a few minutes.
“Um, about forty eight hours.”
“Really?”
“Well, we only got a few hours of sleep the night before we left. So we’ll say three hours of sleep in forty-eight hours. And we still have the entire day ahead of us.”
I groaned. My head hurt. The children were still crying.
By the time we reached Kansas City I was delusional. I couldn’t remember landing in Kansas. When we reached our hotel for our debriefing sessions my friends and I had to stay awake the rest of the day. My head bobbled as I tried to pay attention to the session, which didn’t happen. My team and I had been awake for sixty hours. We went to our hotel rooms, and I crumbled onto the bed, falling asleep instantly.
There were four of us on the DR Congo team. We had all signed up to go to Africa through an organization that sends college students on overseas summer mission trips. We stayed with the Ibanda’s, a Congolese family, and taught the surrounding community how to prevent AIDS and HIV. We taught English classes and Sunday school classes while also visiting surrounding Congolese universities.
But now we were back in America and didn’t want to speak of Africa right away. I wanted to push it to the back of my mind. I wanted to be an American again. But Milly Ibanda’s voice pushed its way into my head: This is the problem we have in Africa. We had seen children running shoeless and hungry through the streets. They stayed far from the orphanages because it was easier to steal than to wait in line for necessities. Some churches had no roofs, only tarps to keep out the rain. This is the problem we have in Africa. Rebel soldiers hid in the jungle, waiting for the right time to begin another war. The water from Lake Kivu was contaminated, yet the people had no choice but to drink it. Children felt through our pockets for Congolese Francs or candy as we walked in the streets. This is the problem we have in Africa.
It was somewhere over in Africa that I said that I wanted to change things. I wanted to help the beautiful people of the DR Congo. It was that summer that I said I would do something about the poverty there. But time away has been difficult. I forget about things I never believed I would forget, and I flip through my journal to remember. I can’t remember the taste of passion fruit or sugar cane. I have forgotten some of my friends’ voices, but I can still see their faces. A lady from English class was so excited that she could say, “Goodbye, I am going to the store to buy food for my family. See you tomorrow.” She never thought that she would ever learn English. I remember teaching a toddler how to walk and teaching him to say hi and bye in English. I remember him climbing down from his mother and walking toward us, waving and saying bye-bye as we walked into the airport. As I sit here, thinking of these people and the memories I have kept of them, I wonder when I will be going back to Africa. And I hope it’s soon.