Lost luggage!!

It all happened when I arrived back in Belgium. I’d just spent 36 grueling hours on planes and in airports, getting back from Buenos Aires to Brussels and everything had gone smoothly, except for the unsettling fact that all the goodies I’d bought in the tax free in Argentina where taken out of my hand luggage and thrown into a big garbage bin upon arrival in Portugal. The security woman who did it, did so with a blank face but I know she was only too happy, anticipating how after I’d gone, she’d be able to fish them out of the bin and take home all those expensive crèmes (Kiehls’, la prairie, Shisheido). When I protested loudly, saying I was in transit and had only just bought them in a previous airport, she replied with a wry smile that I’d arrived in Portugal, where I could not bring anything in from outside Europe, basta!

As for the crèmes, let me tell you that it was the first time in my life I’d ever spent any money on crèmes. Most of my friends have loads of them and keep telling me how great they are. So this time, looking for a way to pass the time in the airport, I’d decided to get some. But now that this Portuguese woman had taken them all, I thought of my mum and decided to stick to her policy, which is to keep things simple: a splash of cold water and a bit of Nivea. And she may not be too wrong because everybody keeps telling me how good she still looks at 75.

Anyway, wanting to keep things simple, upon arriving in Brussels with loads of accompanying luggage , I decided to check them into a locker so that I could have my hands free to frolick around and get some shopping done before returning to Africa. After all, I’d had great expectations for shopping in Brazil and Argentina, but prices had been both shocking and choking. So now that I was in Brussels, I had to make up for that, as fast as possible. So I checked my two huge bags in and went downtown. Hours later, when I had to retrieve my luggage in order to check in for my flight to Abidjan, standing in front of the lockers I suddenly noticed that I’d lost the little piece of paper with which I was to get the automate to open up my locker. I turned my pockets inside out, a dozen times, but no luck, I’d lost the ticket. Mama mia! What was I to do?

A bit nervous, I started dialing the number advertised next to the lockers ‘in case of emergency’. The phone rang and rang, but on the other hand no one seemed interested to pick up the phone. Now what was I going to do? Leave the locker-room and just check in my hand luggage and retrieve my big bags upon my next trip to Brussels, in five months time? No, I couldn’t do that; I needed to find someone to help me. While I kept looking around frantically, a tall skinny man showed up in a uniform. When I asked if he could help me, he looked a bit puzzled. I explained him how I’d lost my ticket which had on it the number of the locker where I’d put my stuff, and a special code to open this Ali Baba’s cave. I described him that I’d forgotten the number of the locker, but that I’d put my stuff in an upper locker, vividly remembering how the ones on the ground had been full and how hard it had been to lift my heavy bags up into an upper locker.

The man kept asking me patiently where I thought I might have stored it. “Which locker do you think my dear, the one up here? Or the one next to it?”
I kept biting my lips, wondering where on earth I’d stuck my stuff but I could hardly remember anything, only that it had been in the upper compartment.
The man opened up all the upper lockers, one by one. There were about thirty of them, and it was a tedious job --he had to give in lots of numbers into the machine and often got the combinations wrong and had to start all over again. Every single locker took at least three minutes to swing open, and when that happened I was not allowed to look while he peeked inside, as I might be tempted to point and say ‘Yes, there it is, that’s mine’, whenever there was a Louis Vuiton bag or a Gucci suitcase in there. So I’d had to tell him what my luggage looked like (a plain red bag and a blue one), and each time when he’d opened a locker and peeked inside, he just turned around to face me and shook his head, “Nope, that wasn’t it.”

With each opened locker my courage sank deeper into the ground and both of us got closer to the thought that I might have lost the paper in front of the locker and that someone else had run off with it. “I’ll open up till the end of the row, but if by then we can’t find it, I will have to take you to the police office to hand in a declaration of theft” the man said.
He opened another one, and again he shook his head. Meanwhile I tried to recall the evening I’d packed my bags and my mind started scanning what exactly I had put in there. Because all of that was gone now, someone else was going to enjoy it. Bye cowhides, bye art works, bye books, bye handicrafts, bye posters, bye little robot, bye old red telephone, bye clothes, bye shoes, bye swimsuit, bye all the havaianas gifts… Bye bye to everything!
Just when I was thinking how sad it all was, the man suddenly asked “Shall we try the lockers on the ground floor?” At first I thought it was useless to do so, hadn’t I dragged the bags up in the air and remembered those movements so vividly? So why bother looking? Also, my time to catch the plane was running out, I really had to hurry up.
Because I was so hesitant, the man was not sure what to do either and decided to call his boss for advice. “Just open them one by one, make sure to check them all’, was the answer. And so he started opening each and every one of them again, the upper ones, and after that also the ones on the ground floor. And guess what? When number 14 flung open, the man turned around and looked at me “What about that, a blue and a red bag, couldn’t that be yours?”
When I stepped closer to have a look inside that locker and saw my bags, the two of them, safe and sound, I spontaneously jumped into the man’s arms. The weight and the surprise of it all almost threw the poor man to the floor, but he told me not to worry, it was his first day on the job and he was as happy as I was.

As for me, I was too happy to be embarrassed. I’d just gotten all my stuff back, and felt richer than ever before. It felt outrageous to get both of them back- I would already have been too happy to just get one of them.

Maybe you should experience that too, to have your stuff ‘disappear’, and then magically turn up. There’s no better way to appreciate what you have and make you smile all day! (A smile that is only overshadowed by my concern about what I call my ‘early stages of dementia’, because how could I so vividly remember something that clearly never took place? Aye caramba! Of course, my friends will just laugh it off, but I am really worried…)

THE END
PS- As usual, whenever you think that you overcame a hurdle, it turns out that it was only the beginning, and a benign one in comparison with what was to come. In this case, when I checked in, with my luggage!, I was told that my name was not on the list. Seemed that someone had cancelled my booking. Ahum! Luckily the flight wasn’t full and they managed to find me a seat.
Then, when you have to pass the security people, they this time did not take any of my liquids, they were by now all in the bathroom of that Portuguese woman, but it was my laptop that they wanted to take this time. They could not explain me why, but something was wrong with it. They slowly passed it back through the scanner, again and again, and just when I was about to throw a fit, or get an epileptic attack, the man at the scanner shrugged his shoulders and said ‘go ahead, you can take it.’

And that’s how I finally ended up on the plane and got to know my neighbor, a young French girl travelling to Ivory Coast to meet up with her new love, a French soldier, but that’s another story.

Bye bye!

Griet

travels in the land of Carnaval- part II- RIO

After Sao Paulo there was Rio which meant carnaval with a huge defile in the sambadrome, all night, and with many many streetparties (blocos) for several days, all of which needed lots of stamina and I keep wondering how they did it, is it the acai juice, the matte, the farofa??? One thing is sure, they do know how to party and seem to have a never ending tolerance for samba dancing (which can go on for hours and hours). Another remarkable thing was the often great sense of humor and creativity displayed in their costumes. These characteristics make them a most wonderful people, I would not mind if one of my daughters comes home with such a creature (in ten years time, that is, they're only nine years old right now!)

Anyway, once carnaval was over, the Brazilians could start 2012 like all the rest of us had already done weeks earlier. Life went back to normal and there was time to visit the beaches and other great sights in this, it has to be said, magnificent city. Mountains, lush vegetation, a big lake, beaches all around... you name it, Rio has it.
What it also has:
-crazy chauffeurs (bus, taxi)
- lots of police everywhere (which is very reassuring, also the fact that a lot of favellas have been 'pacified')
-a truly mixed population (in that you can have the looks from Asia, India, Caucasia, Africa all next to each other)
-great fresh fruit juices on each and every corner
-caipirinhas and cachaca in each and every bar
-a lot of sun so that whilst at the beach one has to be careful because before you know it you look like a toast - a golden one after 30 minutes, a brown one after one hour and a very black burnt one after only two hours!
-besides the sun one finds at the beaches heaps of bare buttocks (just like you see the women of the 'indigenous population ‘dressed in the museu do indio- a lovely museum but such a pity that they don't let you buy the beautiful artifacts straight from the museum!)
-so as I said, heaps of bare buttocks on the beaches, in all shapes and sizes, but not one single bare breast. The idea of being topless for them is apparently very shocking, and only to be condoned during carnaval when there's a lot of body paint over it.
-besides the bare buttocks, lots of people are wearing braces. Not the young ones, but the ones in their thirties and older. I wonder if that is a fashion accessory here, who knows. In any case it must be good news for the dentists.
-Talking about dentists, maybe I’ll have to re-school myself so that I can come live here... Or maybe it will just be easier to hope that, if there's such a thing as an afterlife, I'll come back as a Brazilian. A Brazilian with money, that is, because it's certainly no bargain over here!!

END

PS- For my friends from Antwerp: those 'blocos' parties resemble very much the 'beiaard concerten', in that there's a gathering of a huge crowd of friends. Only difference is that in this case there will be a band playing samba all evening, and the people will be dancing the samba all evening, and they will fuel their sore legs with caipirinhas and will be dressed in some funny outfit, but for the rest they will be talking and laughing and gossiping just like at the beiaardconcerten. Voila!

Last night I witnessed the weirdest spectacle ever. Weirder than what I’d observed somewhere in the mountains in Japan with a seemingly drunken Japanese Shinto priest or at a Bhagwan meeting in Denmark.

No, this was something different all together. Candomble, it was called. A bunch of white men and women, sixty of them and maybe two Africans, all dressed in white robes with lace frills that made them look seven times bigger (fatter), and the men often with what looked like a sheet draped over them and skinny white pants underneath, decorated with bracelets of woven straw on which cowries where attached, a white cloth draped around the women’s head, the men often with something resembling a surgeon’s head wear, lots of colorful items attached to their waist belts, some with a string of goat teeth around their necks … these people all throwing themselves, in turn, on the floor in front of their gods and goddesses, dancing around to the sound of drums and their own songs, whilst a woman went around carrying a pot of fumes that smelt very much like marihuana, which might have explained some of the even weirder dancing that followed, as if they tried to imitate the swiveling dervish, and then some other woman pouring a liquid on all those disciples heads, but that did not seem to calm them down much. Anyway, it looked like a circus, or maybe more accurately, a bunch of old hippies gone mad.

After this ‘religious ceremony’ the different reincarnations of deities could call you and give you advice or just energy. I got the latest, from a trembling rather young man whose very warm hands slid over my shoulders and my back, who put rose petals on my neck and kept shivering and trembling while massaging my hands and uttering things in Portuguese of which the last part got translated to me, and said that I ought to put that very rose petal under my cushion for a week and, I assume, that life will be great ever after.

Well, to tell the truth, life is pretty great right now. I guess I was born to just wander around. Whenever I am in airports or on planes, I just feel so very happy, so filled with possibilities that a wide grin shows up. I suddenly feel like the plastic cover around me has been taken off and I can breathe freely. I remember being in an airport in Europe once to take a flight to a place not so far away, but passing by all the other boarding rooms and watching the signs and being so jealous of the ones sitting in the room that said ‘Shanghai’ or ‘Tokyo’ or ‘Rio de Janeiro’. Oh, if I could just walk into one of those rooms and get one of those planes! This time I just did it, I got on the plane to Brazil. Whilst sitting in that boarding room this time, I had expected that half the passengers would be black, or at least some creamy color (I’d promised my girl friends to bring one gorgeous bronze one for each of them!) But it wasn’t. White people only, the whole plane load. My neighbor, who turned out to be a Brazilian vegetable garden enthusiast living in Bristol (whose garden yielded more than 65 different fruits and vegetables last year, with Jamie Olivier filming it and using its produce in his cooking shows), well, this neighbor, who after eleven hours chatting felt like a brother I’d known all my life, showed me a book which said that the whole of Brazil has only 6 percent of African population, and about 30% mixed but the greater majority being white. So I don’t know why I had this impression that it would be mixed like in Cuba…

Here in San Paulo, where I’ve started the journey, you’ll be lucky to spot one African in the street, and in the buildings they are the cleaners, not the residents. Also, another mystery is the impression I had that all Brazilians were good-looking goddesses. What I see here on the street would fit more my idea of the East German population, a few decades ago! With the only difference that every single one of them seems to wear at least one tattoo (and I doubt whether that was the case in East Germany). Also, another difference is that people here talk about carnival all the time -- it seems that their year, their job, their life will only start after the carnival.

Anyway, people tell me it’s good that I’ll be heading to Rio too, that there I’ll see more of what I had been expecting. Let’s see!

Meanwhile it has to be said that the there’s a great offer of food from all over the world, especially a lot of Japanese, and it’s of great quality and easily found. There are coffee shops on every corner of the street and the people are very friendly. When you start talking to someone they are very welcoming, nobody asks you if you are from the police, as people in Belgium ask me on occasion, like when I sit next to someone in the bus or the doctor’s waiting room and start to chat with them.

And the Brazilians are great with plastic. You’ve heard of the haivananas success, those flip-flops in all sizes and colors. Well, another great success are their Melissa shoes, stylish plastic shoes in all sizes and colors. I’ll go and try on some today, ole!

END

January is the longest month

The other night we were sixteen women in a tiny place, called "Chez Christy- Salon de Beauté”, having our hair done -- which for Africans means taking off their wig and getting some parts of real or fake hair (real from India, fake from China) sewn into their short cropped own hair. In fact, you don't see too many scissors at an African hair salon, rather heaps of needles and thread, and a smoking machine that looks like a waffle maker. No waffles in there, but some pieces of iron that get very hot and will straighten or curl any piece of hair you put in it.

I have to say that I love watching it all because when it's well done, I barely can tell that a woman is wearing a wig. So when she walks in, sits down with a plop and then with one movement brushes it off and reveals a rather bald looking head, I am pretty shocked. And then, a few hours later, she will walk out with an Asian look - long straight black hair, for example, or something else all together. Anyway, a completely different look from the one she walked in with. In fact, I often have trouble recognizing my female colleagues because every Monday they walk in with a totally different style - they can be suddenly a Cleopatra, or a wild tigress or a punk or... It's endless, you should come see for yourself!

So there we were, all 16 of us, half staff and half clients, getting their hair done, their nails polished or their feet scrubbed, when suddenly a man knocked on the door. He looked middle aged and rather well dressed, not a masked bandit with a rifle or machete. However, the salon owner told her staff to keep the door locked and not let him in, because that's how the thieves operated these days, she said, when holdups where all too common now that everyone was trying to find some money to get through the month of January, which they say is the longest, after all the money has been spent on the year end festivities.

We just sat there, wondering what we had in our purses and how bad it would be to lose them. The man at the door however was not willing to go away and tried to make the girl open the door. I felt like one of those goats in the fairy tale where the wolf comes knocking on the door and they go and hide in the tall clock. Looking around I could not see any clock, just a few tiny cupboards, barely enough to hide a pint-sized- dwarf.

The man kept gesturing to be let in. The owner stood up and made a NO sign. The man peeked through the glass door, trying to get a better look of who was inside. I suddenly stood up and did the Japanese sign for NO, like I'd once seen in a Toyota add. I'm not sure if he understood that, he might have thought that me, the only white there, meant to slit his throat. Or more likely, that he might get in trouble when a white is involved. Anyway, he turned around and walked away.

I can't tell you how relieved we all were, though for a while we were sure that he was just hiding behind a car and might try to slip in as soon as we needed to open the door to let a customer out. But after half an hour, when he had not shown up again, we started to relax.

Meanwhile the staff continued sewing and braiding, some clients can sit there for up to four hours to get their hair done, and return the next day to finish it off with another couple of hours, especially when they want very intricate patterns using very fine meshes to weave in or sew in, according to the client’s choice. In the meantime they'll just wrap a colorful piece of cloth around their head. With all this weaving and sewing that you see here, of women and girls’ hair, even on the pavements of Abidjan, it should not have been surprising that a friend of mine found her five year old daughter cutting off her lovely blond curls with a scissor. "What the hell are you doing, stop that immediately" she yelled at the little one, who responded calmly: "Mum, no need to get into such a fit! If you don't like it, I'll just sew it back on tomorrow!'

Et voila, so far on hair in Ivory Coast.

Big hugs,

Griet

Of a Ghana busride and Nigerian movies

A couple of months ago I was travelling by bus in Ghana. Not just a bus, but a shiny giant with the name DIPLOMAT written all over it. The ride was going to take me from Takoradi to Accra, Ghana’s bustling capital, in about five hours time, for the sum of 6 dollars.

So there I was, in a big bus filled with Africans of all sizes and ages, talking away in languages I’d never heard. It reminded me of being in a busy massage parlor in Vietnam, the women and clients chirping away and me not understanding a word, but somehow feeling very much at home amongst all those strangers.

A man entered the bus, carrying plastic waste baskets in various colors. I thought he was selling the latest Chinese merchandise, but later on I understood that the DIPLOMAT was to be kept very clean, and that all travelers’ little black plastic bags carrying their popcorn and fried bananas, were to end up in there.

While the bus was still waiting to fill up further, a man showed up waving a little book entitled ‘PLEASE REMIND THIS’. While waving the book, he explained some of what we could find inside. He said: “For instance, do not say ‘Hey woman’, but instead ‘Good day, spinster, mistress, or whatever her appropriate title is”. As for the tenses, he explained “The woman will come tomorrow, she will come today, and she came yesterday”. “Very easy”, he said. Also, “Do not say ‘You chop?’ But ‘Have you eaten?’ And women, do not ask money to just any man, only to your husband”. I was a bit puzzled if that was some moral lesson he added for free, or if there was some English grammar in there too, that needed to be improved… Anyway, after his presentation, various people raised their hands, wanting to buy a copy.

Then another man stood up and said “I am not going to talk much”, and went on to talk nonstop for three hours straight, or at least so it seemed, because long after the bus had left the station, he kept rattling on. At first his voice was rather pleasant, but then it started crackling as if it needed some oil, and instead of giving it some rest, the man then decided to start shouting. And shouting and shouting. I looked around wondering why all the passengers kept quiet. Wasn’t anyone going to ask him to shut up? Africans are somehow very tolerant and respectful. I don’t think in Europe we’d let anyone go on like that, unpunished.

Anyway, my neighbor was a young Ghanaian student. When I asked him what the man was talking about, the student told me that the man was preaching. And yes, at times the whole bus joined him to say ‘Amen’ and ‘Halleluiah’. I think he was praying for a safe journey. But once he got the crowds’ approval and attention, he quickly switched to professing us the incredible qualities of some kind of medicine he had on offer. He tried to convince us that the bottle he held in his hand, filled with a brownish concoction, could cure malaria, constipation and infertility in one go. He sold it for only two cedis a piece, which is about two dollars, so he was not going to get very rich selling it anytime soon. Which turned out to be true, because after telling us how great the medicine was, he then continued to tell all of us that he’d been selling this thing for many years already, and that by now he was 64 years old. He looked at least 90, but no one stood up to tell him that. But I think it might have put the travelers off from buying the medicine, because not many people offered to buy some, which clearly seemed to upset the old man. He tried once more to approach every single passenger, pushing the dangling medicine bottle in their face, but when most declined, his smile turned sour and he sat down.

I quietly rejoiced, thinking that now, finally, we were going to have some quiet. But lo and behold! the bus driver then proceeded to put on maximum volume a crackling copy of some Nigerian movie where a bunch of tall men and voluptuous women clad in colorful boubous were sitting in a large living room in gigantic velvet sofas, shouting at each other. Sometimes they moved to a terrace outside and then again into the living room inside the house. The shouting never stopped, women behaved rather hysterical, and some of them were always stealing money from their rich-but-not-so- good-looking- husbands, to pass it on to some younger-and-better-looking-lovers, who then passed it on to their long-legged-and-rather-pleasantly-built-girlfriends. But then somehow the married women always seemed to run into their lovers when they were out with their girlfriends and those exchanges were not always very edifying… Anyway, lots of shouting matches, lots of women fainting, lots of men consuming large amounts of whiskey, lots of men threatening to give their women a beating or two etc etc. Meanwhile the passengers on the bus did not seem bothered by the deafening noise nor the fact that the DVD got stuck all the time. They were enjoying all of it and laughing their eyes out.

As for me, I might have preferred a documentary on the lives of wolves or wash bears, but was forced to watch this Nigerian movie because of its all-invading sound, and also because there was little else to do since the curtains of the bus were drawn, so there was no chance to observe the scenery outside, which in a way was not such a bad thing as it made it easier to overlook the car wrecks littering the road side. (Some cars were barely recognizable and reduced to a fifth of their original size…)

Anyway, the sellers and the movies and the drawn curtains somehow worked wonders because before I knew it, the central character in the movie, a huge man with a tiny moustache, had dropped death (too much whiskey? Or a heart attack after the strain of giving his straying wife a ‘corrective beating’?) Anyway, the women around him in the movie (nieces, aunties, second and third wives etc) were all crying and yelling to God that they’d never betray their man anymore, whereas the audience in the bus was cheering and the DIPLOMAT came to a halt. We’d reached Accra!


END

Airport story: how we ended up in Morocco and missed a big party

Early July we were trying to go to Belgium for our annual leave. We’d chosen to fly Air Maroc because of three things: they were way cheaper (1500 dollars), they don’t bother much about you putting on a safety belt (whereas some other airlines really insist on that and would wake up a sleeping baby to force the thing on and then run away when the crying baby needs to be soothed), and last but not least, the stewards are usually in a good mood (because of all the frolicking that goes on in the back of the plane with their fellow colleagues).

Enfin, you see that I had some good reasons to choose this particular airline.

*12 PM: One rainy Friday night in July we checked into Abidjan airport just before midnight. We installed ourselves in the cafeteria and waited.

*1 AM: Some people in the cafeteria are ordering overwhelming amounts of beer – it seems some of them are gearing up for a big party upon arrival.

*2 AM: Beer is sloshing on the table next to us where a man with the haggard look of a clochard keeps gulping down ever new bottles of beer. He insists on joining our table.

*3 AM: The plane is supposed to come and get us around 3 AM. But all we see is some grey haired man (in what might have been a pilot uniform) being busy on a large phone while his hand keeps making circling movements.

*4 AM: We gather that the plane has not been able to land due to a big storm. This might be true; it is rainy season after all. We also gather that the plane has gone to land nearby, in Accra (Ghana) and will return as soon as the weather permits. The ‘pilot’ and the group of blue uniformed women around him dissolve mysteriously from the cafeteria. Niko and Remi are sprawled out on some chairs, sort of sleeping. Mr Clochard keeps chirping away about the nightlife in Ivory Coast, France and Germany whereas I wish he’d tell me how he got the money for his plane ticket.

*5 AM : We gather that the plane in Accra does not have enough fuel to return. The refueling point in Ghana airport opens at 8 AM.

*6 AM: The kids wake up and ask when we’ll fly to grandma and grandpa.. A little boy runs by and the three of them start playing together. Clochard offers them a sip of beer

*8 AM: Air Maroc tells us that the plane in Accra is still waiting for the weather to improve in Abidjan. Which leaves us a bit puzzled – why are all the other planes landing and leaving? We gather through the grapevine that the crew in Accra now needs a rest. Then Air Maroc announces proudly that we will get served breakfast.

*9 AM: A rather attractive African lady, clad in Prada, has joined the Clochard. Most of the passengers watch with disbelief and disapproval as the two of them exchange phone numbers and clear out more beer bottles and cigarettes.

*10 AM: By now almost half the passengers have been served a croissant and coffee. The other half are still waiting. It seems the two Ivorian waiters do not want to part with their croissants, nor their coffee. The Clochard, himself half Ivorian, yells: “Please give us two China man, at least we would have been served hours ago!” Then he runs up to the waiters and grabs two croissants off them (to the great indignation of the waiters, and Lady Prada).

*11 AM: We have been waiting for 11 hours. One man amongst us stands up. He is an Ivorian, dressed in a yellow costume. He says that it is not right, the way we are being treated. The crowd approves. He says we need to find someone from Air Maroc to tell us when we are going to fly. The crowd roars. They follow him as one man to the Air Maroc office. This is closed. Not a single Air Maroc soul to be found.

*11.30 AM: A luggage handler has been grabbed as he passed through the waiting room. Someone recognized him as a worker of Air Maroc. They force him to call his bosses, which he tries, many many times, but no one picks up the phone on the other side.

*12 AM: The luggage handler has gotten in touch with someone who has redirected our crowd to Air Senegal, to take care of us. The crowd moves into the tiny Air Senegal office and we can see the following: the Clochard passes out on a chair, too wasted to stand on his feet, while an older lady is getting difficulty breathing and faints on the carpet, while the mother of the boy starts yelling that her 18 month daughter is having diarrhea and that she needs diapers and water, quickly!

12.30 : Air Senegal decides to put us in a hotel while waiting for a plane. The passengers protest, they demand compensation in cash. Kamiel and I decide to leave the airport and return home. From the taxi window I can see Lady Prada strutting away on her stilettos, never to be seen again.

1 PM: At home we shower, put on fresh clothes and have a meal before ordering a visit from our massage lady.

3 PM: Halfway through the massage, a fellow passenger whom I’d given my number, calls to say that he was transferred to the hotel but has now been brought back to the airport. So we return to the airport, excited about the prospect of flying to Belgium.

4 PM: Back in the airport Mr Yellow Costume gives me an update: we are not going anywhere anytime soon. Because yes, a plane has arrived but meanwhile another problem has arisen: the mother of the boy and baby girl has been thrown in jail. He suggests that even if we were allowed to board, we should refuse in order to put pressure on Air Maroc who then might put pressure on the police to free the woman. Most of the passengers agree.

5 PM: It seems that the police is asking a lot of money to free the woman. Yellow Uniform suggest we all chip in some money to free the woman. Not everyone agrees - loud discussions ensue.

6 PM: The plane is being cleaned. Some Lebanese passengers suddenly decide to run to the plane and board it themselves. Ten minutes later they reappear, rather angrily, being chased off the plane by a security guard while Clochard, slumped over in his chair, is pointing at them, laughing out loud.

7 PM: Suddenly Headbut Woman walks back into the waiting room. Loud applause. Her boy runs to my girls while she sits down to wipe her baby girl clean. She tells me that around 12h30, after Kamiel and I’d left, she was waiting near a shuttle that was going to take them to a hotel. As most people refused to get on board (asking for money instead), some police were to shove them on board. She says that suddenly she felt a big shove in her back, where she carried her baby girl. When she looked back she saw this police man, and then fell into a blind rage. She took her girl from her back sling, handed her to a random passenger, and gave the policeman a head but, ‘Coup Zidane’, she said. The man fell to the ground and had a cut above his eye. Next thing she knew they’d thrown her in jail and demanded a lot of money to let her go (200,000 CFA – for a lot of Ivoirians more than half a year’s pay). It took her hours to find an uncle who had some money and would come depose it and promise to pay up the remaining sum. Only then the police let her go. And having gone through all that, she now did not want to travel anymore.

8 PM: The husband of Headbutter calls and she’s passed him on to me. He, a French man, explains that his Ivorian wife has never travelled out of the country before, and that he’s heard that she has had trouble and now refuses to travel anymore, but if I could please please help get his wife to France because he hasn’t seen her and the kids for nine months and is waiting for them in Paris. I tell him I’ll try my best, if only the plane would leave – which it doesn’t as now the crew seems stuck somewhere in a traffic jam.

9 PM: The crew has arrived and we are boarding!

12 PM: Arrival in Casa Blanca, Morocco. All connecting flights are missed, of course, but Air Maroc announces happily that they will provide us with accommodation for the night.

3 AM: It took us three hours to get through the immigration lines and do the queue in a tiny office to obtain a hotel voucher. Mr Clochard was widely awake and when he tried to jump the queue and got rebuked, he started shouting again about the need for ‘China men’ and how much more quickly we would all be served then.

4 AM: After waiting some more for the shuttle to the hotel, we have finally arrived in our room. The kids are excited to be staying in a ‘real’ hotel (where you need to swap a card to open the door). Kamiel and I are happy to take a shower, even when we cannot find any towels and have to use a spare blanket.

7 AM : We get up to get some breakfast and rush back with the shuttle to the airport to try to get on the 9 AM flight to Brussels. In the shuttle we find some old friends – Clochard with a fresh bottle of beer and Mrs Headbutter with her two kids in tow.

8 AM: We have been waiting for half an hour in the immigration line and when it was nearly our turn, the immigration official’s stamp suddenly died. He walks away to get it repaired and never shows up again. The whole line keeps waiting in disbelief.

8.50 AM: We had started queuing in another line and are now in front of another immigration official. Kamiel hands him our 4 passports. The man looks and asks where the papers are. Which papers?

9 AM: In our zombie-like state we’d forgotten to fill out the immigration papers. Kamiel runs to the airport entry to get them and to fill them in.

9.15 AM: We finally reach the plane for Brussels which should have left already, but which is, surprise surprise, delayed.
Half an hour later we do take off.

1 PM: Arrival in Brussels. Rather happy to be home and also to have missed the in-laws party the night before – some might say that all the hassle was just worth it!


END

Update

So where were we in 2008 and where will we be in 2009? Let me try to answer that:

- Well, all of 2008 we were in Ivory Coast, a land famous for pineapples and postponing elections. We've been here over four years now. Me and our two girls (Remi 4 and Niko 6) live in the capital, Abidjan, while Kamiel is living up north in a city called Bouake (former rebel stronghold) and coming down every other weekend.

-The kids love it here, the good weather, the playing in the garden and the communal pool. They go to a little 'private' school down the road where they follow a mixed French Ivorian system amongst loads of Ivoirians and a handful of Lebanese kids. This school is better than the public system which is always on strike anyway (since public servant's salaries are paid rather haphazardly). It is of course not as good as a school back in Belgium because over here they're rather fond of 'corporal punishments' but so far our girls still seem quite alive and kicking. The only weird thing is that we now have kids that are more familiar with French than Dutch - the little one in fact hardly speaks a word of Dutch...

-As for work, I’m still happy with my job at the UN radio where I am in charge of programming and therefore can make sure that we broadcast interesting programs on health, education, culture etc.

-As for Kamiel's job, he's still doing logistics for the blue helmets up north - making sure they have their tents, air conditioners, toilets etc. Of course, after nearly five years this gets rather repetitive. Also, he's not too happy with being away from his women all week, but despite all that, he seems to have a rather busy social live up there, interspiced with lots of sports as he became a tennis addict and, guess what, is now even into aerobics! (though not yet wearing those leopard tights).

-So meanwhile we're still here. I guess in 2009 we just have to make sure that Niko -our little Mother Theresa- does not hand out all her toys, clothes and our TV and other furniture to the poor, and that Remi, our comedian, does not fool us too much. Right now she sometimes pretends to lose her voice for a day and speaks in sign language only, and other jokes like that.

Apart from that, I hope Kamiel keeps improving his backhand. That way we'll be around Ivory Coast for another year, I guess, though nothing is ever sure here and we're always open for new horizons.

Voila, we hope you are well and wish you good health and prosperity in each and every way.

Much love from the Belgians

Griet, Kamiel, Niko and Remi

Merri kurismasou!

Happy birthday!

Kids' parties and how to survive them

Dear friends,

I did it, this year I did it! What is she talking about? Birthday parties for kids, organizing the thing and actually surviving it as well.

I have to admit that last year, haunted by the memory of birthday party 2006 with kids climbing up the curtains/walls sprayed with red juice/ couches padded with chips, carpets stampeded with chocolate cake/the screams of my eldest daughter being mauled by one of her invitees (a bad loser in one of the party games)… all of this meant that I couldn’t muster the courage to organize even one single birthday party in 2007. I figured that since my daughters couldn’t read calendars yet, I could keep telling them that their birthday
hadn’t come yet. And so a year went by filled with nearly every weekend birthday parties of their classmates and friends, but their own was always ‘just a few months’ away. The way they swallowed it, I have to say that I was rather proud of my achievement.

But of course, this could not go on indefinitely, especially since their ‘imminent’ birthday became a daily topic at the breakfast table and their demands in the way they wanted it organized, was growing at an alarming rate.
So last weekend Niko turned six. I had to do something, despite my bad memories and despite the magnificent demands a birthday party over here poses. Because one would imagine that in Africa one can get away with a simple gathering of kids, maybe some musical chairs, some juice and a slice of cake.

Not so! Birthdays seem to be the mother’s preferred way to show off their house, exquisite clothes, flashy car and string of jeweled aunties and uncles. That’s the African middle class, with a big banquet under a canopy in the lush garden and all their friends and family dropping by for a bite and a drink, their necks heavy with golden chains. In the poorer quarters the family and friends will be heaped together inside a tiny room, the guests of honor on the couch (still in its plastic covering), while a TV is blaring away. With expats, especially the Indian community, birthday parties come with a cast of clowns, fairies and here and there a batman or Cinderella thrown in to amuse the kids with games and dances. Then there’s the banquet for all the guests, a cake in the shape of snow white and at the end of the party there’s a gift for each kid to take home – which is another item of huge competition amongst the mothers; these days the take-home gift is often more expensive than the one you came with.

As I had to do something, I ordered dutifully whatever Niko wanted: a clown, a witch and a fairy who would put make-up on all the kids and entertain them with song, dance and a puppet show. I also ordered a cake the size of our apartment, bought enough drinks to fill a lake, got a cook to prepare snacks, got another one to serve it, got two nannies to do crowd control in case the clown or fairy got a nervous breakdown, and I invited all her friends that I knew and gave her another bunch of invitations to invite all the ones I didn’t know.

The party was to be held on Saturday, in the garden for the kids and upstairs for the parents, which meant that I spend another morning cleaning out the living room and making the flat representable, hiding Remi’s anti-fleas shampoo etc. Then I asked everyone to pray that it wouldn’t rain, because in order to avoid the 2006 scenario, kids had to stay in the garden.
Meanwhile, up in Bouake, the ex-rebel fief where Kamiel is, unfortunately, still based, trouble was brewing with some disgruntled ex-rebels who want their slice of the cake, or else…. So they had held the town captive for a couple of days and were threatening to do so again, to put all movement in and out of Bouake on hold till Monday morning. So there Kamiel was, stuck in Bouake. I told my friends to start praying even more.

‘Dieu est grand’, as they say over here, because the weather was perfect (a bit overcast so scorching sun, but dry all the same), the kids enjoyed the entertainment, the parents behaved as well, the cake was gone in a minute, I haven’t received any report of food poisoning yet, and, best of all, Kamiel made it in time to the party (don’t ask me how he did that), and, what’s more, I now even feel like I could do this again, in a month’s time, when Niko’s sister, Remi, will turn four!

we´ve been dogsitting, but clearly, ONE chihuahua isn´t enough!