Story Time

The plane is backed. Every seat fillled. The baggage storage area in the overhead compartments is backed. Each African attempts to bring on the largest possible carry-ons and I a swear they try to take on three to four bags. The smell of African BO is starting to take over. I am reading a book trying to ignore the chaos around me as people are trying to get situated for the long flight. The next thing I know a loud french-spoken debate (to call it nicely) begins to arupt between one of the passengers and the flight attendant. It never falls every trip I go on this happens. I can not speak french but it is fairly obvious. There is no room to store their luggage. It needs to be put under the plane or maybe in an overhead compartment far from their seat. The African will not allow their luggage to be put anywhere out of their sight and man are they getting angry. This loudly spoken debate lasts for about 10 minutes before the African finally consistents quite frustrated to move her two extremely large bags to where the flight attendant has requested. I really don't get it. I have been amazed for a people that on the large part have a lot less money than I do they carry the largest pieces of luggage I have ever seen.

We finally are all seated. The plane is moving towards the run way and the flight attendant is going through the steps for safety. They get to the part about in the case of emergency find the closest exit. She then proceeds to clearly state twice that in the case of emergency DO NOT TAKE your luggage with you. I just had to smile. I may have never paid attention to that in the past but I don't remember that line as part of the normal safety speel. Of course, I can just imagine it the plane has crashed we are all trying to get out of the plane but half the people MUST get their luggage. Of course they would preface it....it probably is only funny to me but I sure got a chuckle out of that mental picture considering the debate I had just witnessed.

Once we got to Bangui, there was a huge fog. We tryed to land twice, circled around the airport for about an hour, and then finally decided to go to Chad to refuel....needless to say we were in the plane 4 hours longer than usual. By that time, the smell was really beginning to overwhelm me. Ah well, I finished my book.

Yesterday and today have been good days. I meet with the head African representative for ICDI to explain what I was doing on my trip. Overall, his response was good and he asked intelligent questions. This guy is not really in charge of the operations but more works the government issues but as far as this culture is concerned we must pay him the respect of informing him of what is going on. Today, I meet with all of the program managers to explain the budget process. They seemed to understand it and are deeply grateful. In this culture (as with most), having the ability to control the money signifies power and respect. Giving them the budget figure that we have for the program they are responsbile for and then telling them to decide how to use it to accomplish their mission is a sign to them of our confidence in them. I think it will do a lot to continue pushing and developing our vision to empower the Central Africans to run this operation on their own. In addition, it will help in control the expenses and giving us leverage to discuss potential ideas and direction of the organization. I have a feeling that I will probably have more problems with the US staff on keeping to a budget than with the African staff but we will see.

Tomorrow at 6 am (seriously no one should be moving at that time) we will be leaving for Berberati. Oh, I hate this trip. 12 hours on a rollercoaster. I have some car sick stuff...we will see if it works but I will have enough room that I can actually stretch out and sleep (in between all the bumps).