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| Courtesy of Glenn Nordquist |
There are those flights that when you come out from them you begin to understand better what «Safe journey» mean. I think I have come to understand it in a semi hard way today. At the end of my community experience in my new oblate province of service, I took Air Canada to fly back to my mission area. The flight was booked almost a month ago and was scheduled to take off at 18:05 (-5GMT), from Montreal to Sept-Îles. On my arrival at the Airport, I discovered that the flight time has been changed to 19:15. As I have learnt after a recent incident I had with CAM-AIR CO. (Cameroonian Airline), last two months, that the best virtue to cultivate with Airlines is patience, I decided to take my suffering with care.
As if it was not a problem changing the time of the flight, at 19:10, we received another announcement telling us to bear with them again as there were few logistic steps to be taken still. Happy enough, at 19:45, our flight took off.
Throughout the major part of the flight, it went really swiftly and smoothly till we arrived in Sept-Îles. No one needed to be informed that we had arrived in one of the areas of Canada where winter and wind have sealed a dangerous alliance. The feeling was like the one you experience jumping from an asphalted road into an abandoned and neglected track. It is the type of road you take when going from my village (Ugbaike) to Amufie. A road where Okada men (commercial motorcycle riders) will double charge a pregnant woman who is going on maternity visit because of the time it takes him to assure that the woman would not enter into an early and forced labour.
What came to my was «what could have been the reaction of the passengers if they were all from the country of Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche»? While many would have unavoidably started shouting «Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! others would have started invoking either The Blood of Jesus or Holy Ghost Power etc. Even those who, on normal days, do not know the road to the Church would have become serious believers as long as that was to give them the hope of surviving the incident. After what lasted for like 5 minutes, we landed at the Airport to the relieve of all the passengers.
And as if fate wanted to continue testing our patience, we waited and waited for our luggage to no avail. The only option left to us was to go home and come back the next day for our bags. Thank God we arrived well but I am tempted to think that Air Canada unfortunately has also proven it could act like every other airlines.
