The Happy Way to Fly

I made it! As expected, it was rather long, exhausting, and stressful, but now I am safely at the hospital in Hargeisa, so I guess it was all worth it. To recap some of the crazy travels….

On Monday morning, my brother and Jolene dropped me off at the St. Louis airport. After leaving them to go through security, I was starting to get a bit more nervous. But low and behold, Roisin Burton-Beahan was leaving from Ireland only two terminals away from me! I was walking, looked up, and there she was (for those who do not know Roisin, she’s a wonderful high school friend who is currently in Ireland with her family). After about 30 minutes, she headed to Chicago and another 40 minutes and I boarded my first flight. I agreed to switch seats with a mother-daughter who were separated and could not speak English. Unfortunately, that put me in the very back corner by the toilet. Stinky! But this would be the shortest leg.

From DC, my second flight was to Frankfurt. It was the longest at almost 8 hours. I attempted to sleep, but I was again at the back (although not by a stinky toilet) so my chair wouldn’t recline. Sadness. I sat by an older British woman living in Johanesburg. She promptly offered me a sleeping pill which I declined. She was a funny lady, and very worried about getting fed dinner on our flight, which we got but I did not eat. By the time we reached Germany, I was dead tired. The Frankfurt airport was nice but I did get charged $5 for a bottle of water, what kind of a rip off is that? Also, they had several airport workers riding around on bicycles who periodically rang bells. It was interesting.

I tried to sleep for most of the Frankfurt to Dubai flight (6 hours). I got a window seat with nobody next to me, so I had lots of room to spread out which was nice. At this point, my brain was revolting against the major time warp that had been occurring. Basically, Tuesday, June 1^st does not exist in my world. It was spent in air and with the 9 hour time difference between Missouri and Dubai it seems that it all got lost. I arrived in Dubai a little before midnight. Dubai is where things became a bit more stressful. I was still unbelievably tired and at this point I had to change airlines. I collected my baggage from the United Airlines area, and then went in search of the departures. After trying unsuccessfully to ask for some assistance in being directed towards the departures, I ended up outside in the stifling heat. I ended up re-entering the airport a ways down the sidewalk to the departures area. The signs were rather confusing and I ended up following a father-daughter duo looking for Air Ethiopia to fly to Nairobi. They found there airline but Jubba airways (my airline, catch phrase: the happy way to fly) was not there. So I asked somewhere else and finally was told I needed to go to Terminal II. Turns out Terminal II is all the way on the other side of the airport past all the cargo planes, etc. The help desk man told me to take a taxi. In theory this seems easy, but at 1 am in Dubai it was freaky. At this point, I was beginning to panic a little. Fortunately, I found a taxi and found terminal II. I couldn’t check in until 3am, so I sat in an odd little lounge area for 2 hours. I was able to access the internet on my computer and email my mama where I was. Terminal II was very different from Terminal I. As near as I can tell, Terminal II is for all flights to random, smaller African or Middle Eastern countries and has lower security. This is the first point where I very distinctly stuck out like a sore thumb. I put on a head scarf, but this did not really help the fact that I looked crazy out of place.

At 3 am, a huge line started forming outside the doors into the check-in area. I just got in line. Eventually I made it through this line and then waited in line for my luggage to be scanned. Everyone around me was peaking Arabic and I really had no clue where or what I was doing. After going through this random line, I found two other lines. I randomly chose the line on the right. While in line to officially check-in and receive a boarding pass, I realized the overhead board said Djibouti and Mogadishu….both places I did not want to go. At this point, I was really starting to freak out as I was standing in this random line for a flight to a place I was not supposed to be going. One African couple in front of me in line asked where I was supposed to be going. I told them Berbera, Somaliland. The guy thinks for a minute and then turns to two African women and their children and carries on a conversation in Arabic. Then he turns to some other random guy and talks to him. Within about two minutes, I think the whole line of people knew where I was going. The original couple and the two African women behind me tell me they will help me get to the right place because they are also going to Berbera. Apparently, anyone going to Berbera, Djibouti, Mogadishu, or two to three other small towns in Somaliland all take the same flight to begin with. However, this is not really clear at all from the overhead board and it never reads Berbera but only Mogadishu. From this point on, a group of four to five Africans from Somaliland help me get to the right place. At the gate, I meet one woman’s 10- and 7-year old children. I cannot begin to tell you how relieved I was to have people going to the same place as me. The lady I talked to the most is originally from Hargeisa but now lives in Canada. She was very sympathetic to the fact that I had never traveled to Somaliland before.

Boarding the flight was chaotic. I was actually one of the first on the plane and found my seat, but almost everyone else seemed to have some sort of argument or suggestion to be given about seating to everyone else. All of this was conducted in Arabic, so I just sat and waited. After finally getting settled in, our flight took off for Berbera. First off, we got breakfast. We got a dinner role, a croissant, and a cinnamon role….can we say carb overload. It was good though. The lady I sat with on this flight was not one of the ones who had been so nice earlier but she was very friendly. I had quite a bit of difficulty understanding her, but we did talk a little bit about Somaliland. We also traded seats at one point as she was positive I needed a closer view out the window. She also got me an extra sugar packet from the flight crew, and told me something about Somaliland sugar but I’m not quite sure what....something about sugar losing its flavor.

Once I arrived in Berbera things got really hectic. The plane was to go on to Djibouti and then to Mogadishu, while other passengers were now to be sent on three different buses to other areas. I was to be picked up by someone from the hospital in Berbera. When I got off the plane though, we were not at an airport, we were just in the middle of a sandy field. The same nice lady from earlier tried to help me and ended up calling Edna’s phone to find out where I should go. As it turns out I had to take a bus just a few miles to the actual “airport.” Before I even got off the bus at the “airport,” some guy stuck his head in the window and asked, “Are you Bruno?” I assumed this was the guy from the hospital and I responded “yes” and then a whirlwind of me following this guy around ensued. He took my passport, temporary visa, and fifty-dollars (the visa charge) and then told me to wait. He came back with a lot of Somali shillings, and I continued to follow him around. Mind you, he has not introduced himself to me, we have not actually talked, he simply asked for these documents and I handed them over. Then he pulls out a chair and has me sit outside under a tree with a group of other people. Then a different guy with a gun grabs my bag and tells me to follow him. The first guy says, “Let’s go.” So they put my stuff in a SUV, I get in the SUV, and we drive away. I still do not know either one of their names. They did not speak much English. The first guy was the driver, and the second a hired guard (hence the gun) for the trip which I didn’t realize until we were driving away. Halfway to Hargeisa, the driver turned around and said, “Are you ok?” to which I replied, “Yes.” Basically, I just sat and watched goats, sheep, and camels out the window while the two of them kept talking.

Two hours later I am at the hospital and eating lunch. This afternoon has been a bit of a whirlwind as well. There are lots of people at the hospital: nursing students, pharmacy students, Edna and some of her family, hospital staff, doctors, volunteers. There is another undergraduate student here from Texas volunteering until June 25^th but she has already been here a week. They gave me the afternoon to relax/get over jet lag. But, despite my exhaustion, the adrenaline of being at the hospital has meant I mostly walked around with the other undergrad volunteer today to see the hospital. Tomorrow I will have a clearer idea of who, what, where about the hospital. I’m getting ready to go eat dinner soon, and then sleep!!!!!!

Sorry that was a lot of extra detail about traveling you might not have wanted to know.