Mar 6, 2008
Home
I’m finally home after almost 30 hours either in an airplane or in airports. That last flight from Chicago to Raleigh was the worst of all the flights as I sat beside an overweight, fidgety pre-teen who kept coughing and sneezing on me. Give me an 11 hour flight over that kid any day.
From Kigali to Brussels I shared a flight with neocon, war-criminal Paul Wolfowitz. In Nairobi we picked up a large group of Somali refugees who shared the back of the plane with me while Wolfy slept in his first class haven. All I could think of was the recent US strikes against the small town in Somalia (did you know about that one? I had only just seen a small report while in Kigali.) Despite his role at the neocon-disguised-as-libertarianism-think-tank, AEI, and no longer being officially at the Pentagon, I still have to wonder if he had anything to do with that bombing plan. He was the guy who wrote the “Wolfowitz Doctrine” after all. It would have been brilliant to stick a good number of those refugees in first class with him. Hell, they deserve the reclining seats more than he anyway.
On a brighter note, I did share the ride all the way to Chicago with a young Rwandan guy who was on his way to Pittsburgh to start school. He was super nice and a little worried as he’d never been to the U.S. before. I helped him get through O’Hare which confounds even the most seasoned traveler. Luckily for him (and me) we had long layovers there. That was really good since the Immigration Officers were battling with Windows machines that kept crashing… “We have a Red Alert for IT support at Passport Control” – no really, that was the announcement. Turns out there is no backup plan for that sort of failure. Oooops!
OK – I’m home… now what? I don’t know – let me sleep and I’ll let you know.
Oh, by the way – my cab driver from the hotel to Kigali International Airport told me that I should pass on “warm greetings from the people of Rwanda to the people of the United States”. For my U.S. friends, consider those greetings passed.