Day One - Upon Earth

We, the people of Earth, seemingly the owners and yet too often owned, might fairly ask, "What are we doing here?" A lot but not enough.

And so, for the umpteenth time, I am off to sense how some part of the other 7/8ths lives and see how, in perhaps some small way, I and the we I represent might be able to lend a hand to the greater us.

Thus, the travel ritual returns, to transit from my pre-dawn doorstep, over the curve of continents and a great ocean to a world apart. Liberia, come for the chaos, stay for the pepper chicken.

I am flying solo this trip, at least to Monrovia, the first destination. There, Jay (coming in a few hours earlier from Nigeria) and I will pick-up where we left it last July, but as if no time passed.

The journey over 36 hours is largely in small aisle seats, three flying tubes:

LAX – D.C., ending with an hour’s extra holding pattern over Dulles courtesy a lightning storm;

redeye D.C. – Brussels, starting with another hour’s wait while the crew searched for the promised fuel truck, then a 90-minute jam on the runway courtesy more nasty weather; and

Brussels – Monrovia via Freetown (Sierra Leone), featuring a two hour loading delay due to reasons, if any, never explained.

That Monrovia flight is from Brussels Terminal T, the Africa terminal, generously full of en route Africans, this impossibly huge crowd aiming to pack a flight to Entebbe (Uganda), this other quarter-mile long queue bound for Abidjan Cote D’Ivoire). I traverse that six hour on-the-ground layover in semi-conscious lethargy, ‘cept for those several sitting-up total blackouts. Was I snoring?

Then, in the dark of night two, there -- after the accustomed African plane-length applause for touchdown in one piece -- there out the porthole is that sleek, up-to-date, Chinese constructed Robertsfield terminal. We are not pushed to either of the jetways, they’re un-operational. It’s instead old-school tarmac parking and buses into the border business.

I have spent that southbound flight largely in lively conversation with Gordon, an Ivy League Presbyterian seminarian coming to The Continent for the first time. He’s headed for Mother

Liberia equipped with what he’s uncovered in his Princeton U’s archives on the 18-teens birth of the American Colonization Society. ACS, the White-run “back-to-where-you-came-from” vehicle, status-quo’s initiative to ease the threat of a million-plus American slave uprising on the heels of the brutally victorious, Black-led Haitian revolution (1791-1804). ACS, opposed by abolitionists and slaveholders, supplied the funding and other means for a few thousand former Americans to found this country, 1847, now the oldest republic in Africa.

Gordon and hundreds of our fellow travelers are now experiencing Friday night, Liberian international airport style, with Authority roping

off the baggage carousel so that ten or so handlers can unload all suitcases in a tight herd temptingly out of reach of their pointing and pleading owners. If you are used to nothing making sense in such settings, then this solution to crowd control is perfectly logical.

Yet, the frowns and counter-push of official power cannot hold the human tide forever and we pour over the depository. And there’s mine, standing patiently at attention. Reunited, we roll out to Jay and our rented SUV, and are away towards town.

The way is 35 miles of dark two-lane, a major part under claimed improvement in progress, meaning there are construction-created pits in the road unhindered by any sort of safety barriers as well as long stretches with the shoulders excavated one or two yards below the blacktop. Again perfectly logical for the only road possible to reach the city, virtual cliff drops on both sides and nowhere to go except disaster if, for instance, the president’s motorcade were to happen along, obliging traffic to make way.

Eventually, we pull in to the RLJ Kendeja Hotel and Resort, your beachside enclave away from home and my choice of sanctuary since it opened in 2009. It’s midnight and the staff is gracious to reopen the kitchen to prep-up some hot protein.

Earth has turned under us who have flown here. Now, we turn with it, chicken wing in hand and down the hatch. Tomorrow is, as they say, another day.