Some Days are Diamonds

Some weeks are stones

Maputo, Mozambique. January 1996

It was Friday evening and the end of another week in Paradise during a long travel itinerary to Africa. My sleep cycle was finally synchronized with the local time. My gut still worked mostly okay. If I held up for one more week, I could head home to Maryland, where people went to Walmart and Home Depot, the neighbor guy repaired his truck along the curb and always left his tools out in the rain, and I still had nothing in common to talk about with my other neighbor the plumber.

We finished dinner at the home of our local country director and it was time to shuttle my colleague from HQ back to his hotel on the other side of town. I stayed in the country director’s guest room, but decided to go along for the ride to the hotel. The white Toyota Landcruiser was cleared through customs a few days earlier and I enjoyed the new car smell that was rare in most of the vehicles in our country office fleets. After dropping my colleague at the hotel, we headed home.

Our route took us past the presidential palace along a broad boulevard lined with jacaranda trees still gracing the street with their lavender blossoms. Broad drifts across the road carried away water during summer downpours and also acted as inverted speed bumps. Drive through them too fast and your car will break.

We followed a small, dented Japanese car that crawled through the first drift, so we slowed to keep a safe distance behind the car. At the second drift, the car stopped and two men jumped out. They ran toward us with pistols pointed at us. The young country director asked me what to do. “We give them this vehicle. It’s easier to get another Landcruiser than it is for your wife to find another husband.”

The two men were standing on both sides of the vehicle with the guns pointed directly at our heads. One man signaled for us to get out and I was pushed onto the ground with his gun pressing against the back of my head. The guy on the other side jumped into the driver’s seat and immediately drove away. The gun was still pressed against my skull and the man shouted something in Portuguese. I saw my friend put his hands behind his head, so when I felt the gun lifted away from me, I did the same with my hands.

The second man walked back to the little car while keeping the gun pointed at us. When he got to the car, he sped away into the night.

We kept our hands on our heads and stayed face down on the pavement until we were certain the two thieves were gone. We got up and walked to the edge of the road, where we stood anxiously for a few minutes and then began the long walk to his house. We talked about two other carjackings in broad daylight during the past week where both drivers resisted and were murdered. One was an Italian woman who worked at a local embassy.

I went straight to the guest room when we finally arrived home. I heard my friend telling his wife what just happened as I closed the door. Although the incident happened too quickly to feel fear, I slept a troubled sleep that night dreaming about me face down and dead on the street while my family looked on in horror. The dream returned many times for several months and during the day, if a car in front of me stopped too quickly, I felt a rush of anxiety that stayed with me for hours.

When we finished our work the next Friday, I was taken to the airport for a flight to Johannesburg and home. The Maputo airport was never my favorite because of events surrounding the collapse of the Portuguese colonial regime in 1975. Hundreds of cars were abandoned in the airport parking lot, many with doors and trunk lids left ajar as panicked families attempted to fly out to South Africa, Rhodesia, Portugal, or any other place that would give them sanctuary. As we lifted off for Johannesburg, I stared out the window at the semi-sunken ships in the harbor and the hundreds of rail cars rusting away in the marshaling yards. Near one of the beautiful beaches, I saw the unfinished tourist hotels that now housed squatters. Before the Portuguese builders fled, they filled the drainage systems in the high rise hotels with concrete grout to render them useless.

After landing at the Johannesburg International Airport, I made my way to the car rental kiosks with my baggage on a luggage cart. My briefcase with my laptop, passport, and airline tickets was in the cart’s basket next to my hands. I always tried to keep my valuables very close.

The young woman clerk brought me the rental agreement and I reached for my briefcase so I could write down my passport number. My briefcase, literally against my arm, was gone. Fortunately, I always carried my wallet in my front trouser pocket, so it was not missing, and the clerk accepted my Maryland driver’s license as adequate identification. Annoyed, anxious, and nauseated, I walked to my rental car and drove toward the city center where I had a room booked in the downtown Holiday Inn. It was my first trip back to South Africa since Nelson Mandela became president and I wanted to see what had changed.

After leaving the car in the parking garage, I quickly checked in and went to my room. By then the nausea I felt at the airport become my Next Big Thing that sleepless night. Sometimes travel requires the traveler to make difficult decisions: do I sit on the toilet or do I kneel before it? And sometimes the need is so urgent that there is no time for a decision and if Lady Luck is smiling, a trash can will be within arms reach.

By morning I was spent, but I couldn’t fly home that night unless I tracked down a consular officer to provide me a travel document in lieu of a passport. Fortunately, a very empathetic woman from the embassy agreed to meet me at a nearby coffee shop, so I walked the short distance on sidewalks littered with mango seeds, maize cobs, and hair clippings from sidewalk barbers.

The process of acquiring the travel document was brief and painless. Before our second round of coffee, I had my document in hand and was very grateful to the kind embassy official. Back at the hotel, I was able to reach my long suffering travel agent who somehow made arrangements for me to collect my tickets when I checked in for my flight that evening.

I tried to sleep the rest of the afternoon to make up for the worthless night before, but the gut rot was more acute and much less accommodating. I spent the rest of the day in the hotel until it was time to drive back to the airport for my flight home. That’s when I discovered that someone backed into the rental car overnight and left a massive dent and torn rear bumper. Now, in addition to all my other ailments, I found myself thinking about murder. Fortunately my desire to get home was greater than my need for bloody revenge, but not by much.

After returning the damaged car and making insurance arrangements, I checked in for my flight to London, and for the first time in a week, everything went well. My seat was in the upper deck of a British Airways 747. My only concern was how to escape from my window seat when the diarrheal demons attacked.

Shortly after takeoff, the demons did attack and I politely crawled over my sleeping seat mate to avoid a disaster. After a disaster was narrowly averted, I decided the best strategy was to remain near the head, so I stood against the railing to the lower deck. Eventually a flight attendant saw me and asked me if I needed anything. As delicately as possible, I described my predicament. She pointed to the rear seat in the cabin where the flight attendants stowed their belongings and offered the seats to me. I wanted to hug her. For the rest of that long flight, I traveled comfortably and much less anxiously than before.

When we landed at Heathrow, the kindly flight attendant told me I was to wait until the other passengers deplaned and I would be escorted to the exit lounge for my connecting flight. I waited until almost all the passengers had left and found the woman who was to escort me to the lounge. In addition to me, four Togolese passengers who had flushed their travel documents down the toilets and asked for asylum would accompany us.

After waiting for hours to begin boarding, it was finally time to head home. My demons stayed in London, I had a good seat, and I slept most of the flight. When we landed at JFK Airport in New York, I thought my troubles were finally over, but I wasn’t quite finished with my ordeal yet. I was met at the gate by two security officers who escorted me to an immigration officer in hijab. In heavily accented English, she informed me that I must pay a $100 fee for arriving without a passport. I paid the fee without argument. I was so close to home that no fight was worth delaying my homecoming.

When we drove into our driveway after the trip from airport, I saw the neighbor’s truck was repaired and his tools were still on the sidewalk. The plumber was mowing his yard, and after hugging my family, I made my way to the bedroom and finally fell asleep in my own bed.