November 15, 2003
It would have been titillating if it weren’t so unfair. I don’t mean the fact that I was seated in
the very last row of the airplane from Frankfurt to Khartoum…that was the
result of booking my flight so late, waiting waiting for a sign that my husband
would return to our marriage because I got the slightest glimmer that he would,
I would gladly have scotched the whole trip.
It just felt so strange getting on the plane in San Francisco without
knowing if I’d ever be able to share the learning of this trip with my husband
of 27 years… so strange… so unfair.
But unfairness is all around us in this world. The unfairness of the haves and the have-nots
is the biggest unfairness of them all.
The lot of the “have nots” has nothing to do with how educated they are,
or resigned to their fate, or how hard they work, or how their path through
life gets all twisted. No, their lot is
simply their birthright, their birth mark, their marking of time on this earth
in a grinding everyday existence.
Lufthansa was very discreet in the way they boarded the
Sudanese prisoner. I didn’t realize that
the two passengers in front of me were an unusual couple. The black man with the short curly hair, his
tall companion next to him on the aisle seat.
When we stopped in Cairo to offload most of the passengers
and to take on fuel, the tall guy stood in the aisle for a few moments to
stretch. Overhead vent air circulation
in the plane ceased when the rear exit doors opened for the various service
modules to be loaded. Then I smelled it –
anxiety, fear – not an ordinary perspiration of a passenger on a 4 hour
flight. The movement was so rapid, I
hardly knew what was happening. The
Sudanese literally dove out of the rear exit door and reached the first few
steps of the platform stairs that had been rolled up. His companion lost a few seconds due to surprise,
but tackled him quickly. Then the second
guard reached into his briefcase and took out a pair of handcuffs so rapidly
that I almost missed the move, but it was impossible to miss the resultant
scuffle happening just 3 feet away from me in the airplane aisle floor. Once cuffed, the Sudanese was led back to his
seat, and sat bowed forward for the rest of the trip.
What was his crime?
Being poor? Overstaying his work permit?
Or worse?
I will never know, but I suspect that the root cause was
poverty.
