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The Beauty of Arriving
 For confusion, fearfulness, and worry, try to understand how various airports outside USA work. None of the foreign ones are easy. Especially those in the giant airports of the international world. Take the airport in Tanzania. It has a beautiful layout of runway and simple giant spaces, and everything is done outside with nothing connecting the plane to a building. One must dash out into the runway where a giant plane like Ethiopian, Qatar, Emirates, Turkish, KLM, British, etc. is landing or waiting to suck in the latest group of travelers to haul them away from the simplicity of wonderful Tanzania to some more complicated sort of routine and counterfeit lifestyle, if I can call it that.
For one thing, anyone with loaded bags must go through good inspection. And the young and patient girl at the check-in desk will ask if you had a yellow fever vaccination and that threw me for a loop. It’s been years, and no one had even brought it up. Finally, she realized this wasn’t the time and place because her computer just crashed, and she had a line of folk anxious to get their boarding pass. It took a pile of waiting for the boarding card to print out to finally be in the hands of the traveler. I felt for her predicament, because I know and have known for 60 years, how Tanzania tries and does things right, and with hope, and with love and care. Another oldie but goodie, in all the non-American airlines I’ve booked on this trip, everyone must take off shoes, (age has nothing to do with it) belts, anything that might irritate the container of bags passing through the scanner. Of course, it doesn’t matter the age. Watches, bracelets, earrings, anything metal must be removed and placed in the moveable box. So, it would get scrutiny and honesty and be released on the other side of the checkup. One must redress, put back on shoes, re-buckle jewelry, slip back into a smile and hope to find again the snickers bar I had bought at the entrance to Ngorongoro park, and now it was back on the belt and zip up the laptop, so soon one was released to ignore the things of frustration. At least possessions are back where they were and should be, checked in and ready to move on down the line to wherever a certain destination will divine them.
I’m losing my taste for international travel. But if you don’t leap at the opportunities to learn lives in other parts of the world, well, you aren’t going to have much fun in life’s later lashes.
The enormous runways of Cairo, Egypt, take one’s breath away, but the behavior of the public was frightful as people almost knock each other down to be first or second to grab the business class seat, not even letting the ticket collector do his thing - just to get on Ethiopian Airlines, a quick second change of planes in Ethiopia, and on to the flight that was supposed to breeze us through to Cairo, it’s massive spaces - it seemed half of the whole world was in that huge space of flatness and foreverness and nothing standing in the way - were so busy even in the darkness of night as we crunched on a rocky road in the pitch dark, no street lights, and only room for probably a van and a half.
When we arrived at Egypt’s Cairo airport, we had a series of men who grabbed us, our carry-ons, our bags and set us down in a haven, a lounge, where we were to wait and the greeters got everything together for us, and led us - a long walk - to the attached hotel where I spent the night and was up early for super breakfast food, things allowed, things not allowed, but somehow amazing choices. We don’t get this kind of meet and greet in the States. But I was anxious to just get on with the next step - which was a domestic flight to Sharm B Sheikh (Egypt) and so we were in a massive line of people on the domestic flight - three in a row - me at the window where I could watch the desert and the incredible reddish rocks and mountains again and wonder why I am there, will I be able to accomplish something, and how much longer before I can get home where my life has value and is full of people I know and love and the Grizzlies shine all the time. Sigh.
Once one is above the clouds, and there seems to be peace all over the earth - temporarily - one needs to thank God, and to roll down in one’s mind the many people for whom one needs to be thankful, people who need to be remembered and to be loved and to be prayed for, to catch up on thought, on hope, on seeing the world out the tiny window so that I don’t forget that for a moment I am between earth and the heavens - and ideal would be praising God for all the goodness He has done for me and my husband and dogs and my faith and being able to step into amazing people’s lives for a moment, to bring them some joy that doesn’t seem possible in the norm, and yet these super friends and workers need to be recognized as vibrant, super people who try to better their amazing country, Tanzania, where crime is not packed in day by day by day killing people, like it is in other parts of the world. Those in Tanzania care about their land, their animals, each other, and they have turned a primitive simple life in the land to an amazing profitable and hopeful nation full of creativity, and faith and hope. They believe in Mungu, their version of God, as well as the Christian version, and everyone seems to be working and producing crops like bananas and corn and tea and coffee and sugar cane and beans that seem so vibrant. Everyone works whether it’s artwork for sale hanging on trees, shiny new motorcycles, a herd of goats trotting along the side of the street where the Masai children are due to keep them in order, and the beauty of the women wrapped up in fabrics so attractive - they dress every day like beauty queens, and walk the streets in bright colors and often with a load balanced on their heads to get where they need to go. Lake Manyara glitters like great crystals, and deep in the Ngorongoro crater animals still easily survive and produce even though there are hundreds of land rovers packed with pointing visitors trying to see the animals in the wild, for a photo and a memory that won’t go away soon.
Meanwhile, the roads are sending cars and trucks and shiny motorcycles along, and all the land is a reddish brown, pocked with every kind of common beast, like goats, skinny cattle, and an occasional tall graceful giraffe cutting across the landscape, and oh, look, there is a whole family of buffalo or a field full of zebra and warthogs and did you see the elephant flapping its ears as a warning to stay away? But it’s the people, the beautiful people, the Masai and Mbulu and so many tribes wrapped in bright colored fabrics, a pole in one hand to lean upon, and they dance and tease and sing their sounds, and make you smile as they smile at you and back again. They are the people who from the earliest day (when I was 22) gave me the joy of laughter, smiles, and inclusion, because their land was and is a place that God must treasure above all lands just because the tribes make sure (and made sure from the days I lived in Karatu in 1962-1963) that everything will be all right because that is Mungu in action.
~ Rev
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audrey@audreytaylorgonzalez.com
www.audreytaylorgonzalez.com
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