Hell is an Airport in Africa

I had a great month of July in the States. I spent a lot of quality time with my family, managed to run just about all the errands on my list, reconnected with more friends than I would have thought possible given the limited time, and had a productive week of work related meetings and activities in Washington. But after all the traveling and living out of my suitcases for a month, I was anxious to get back to my home in Niger where I could catch my breath a little bit and get back to work on a few things that have been hanging over my head in the “need to get done” file.

My trip back didn't exactly go smoothly. The itinerary had me flying from Washington to Dakar, Senegal, where I was scheduled to have a 9 hour layover before continuing on to Niamey (via Bamako, Mali). My flight out of Dakar was canceled when the airport workers in Niamey went on strike but they put me on the next flight, two days later. That second flight was overbooked (I'm assuming because of all the people who had been left stranded by the strike two days earlier) and I was one of the ones who got bumped, so they told me I'd have to wait for the next flight, three days later. The third time proved to be the charm and after a 5 hour delay I finally left Dakar on Monday evening, arriving at my house at 3 AM yesterday (Tuesday) morning. I spent most of the day yesterday back at the Niamey airport trying to get my bags out of customs but eventually concluded my arrival yesterday afternoon, about a week after leaving Washington.

As luck would have it, my friend Tim (Timmy, to a few of the Rest’s loyal readers, who previously contributed a few photos of a fish he ate in Uganda) recently took a job in Dakar and moved there about three weeks ago. So not only was I able to avoid taking a hotel room and trying to kill time for almost a week in a completely unfamiliar city, I also got to do a good amount of catching up with Tim, who I hadn’t seen in over a year and who I missed being able to see in Washington by just a few days. We explored his new neighborhood for Senegalese food, wrestled with the kids who live next door to him and got to know the rest of their family, spent a day at the beach, and revived a few ongoing arguments dating back to 2002. In the end, I felt much less like a stranded traveler than somebody who won an unexpected trip to visit Tim in Dakar for a few days.

Feel free to interpret this story as a little parable about how I experience life as a foreigner in Africa. Rarely do things work out as planned, or on schedule, but for every frustrating experience there seems to be more than enough serendipity to compensate.