first flight back

My back made a familiar popping sensation as I tried to pull the 50 kilo sack of sugar from the pod. My first flight back. My very first bit of cargo, and my back dutifully gives out on me. Great. I try to hide the pain as not to worry the passengers and stiffly take to my seat in the cockpit. (Who wants to fly with a crippled pilot?) Especially over Sudan. The land is so tortured and pained itself, it almost seems fitting that I should be in agony as I fly over it. So I flew today, for seven hours, moving twenty people to and from various locations. At some point I arrive at Juba, the new capitol of Southern Sudan, a surreal port city on the west bank of the river Nile, with its huge runway and odd mixture of air traffic - a UN 707 right out of the seventies, a UN chopper of dubious size, a Russian Antinov A26 with bright blue propellors slowly winding down as the back door falls open to spill out some hundred Sudanese troops. I walk by the windmilling propellor, through a small army of tall, black men in green fatigues. They are singing what seems like a victorious song of war in their native tongue. As we walk through the slurry of troops arriving mixed with those departing, my passenger overhears a passing comment about what a young-looking "captain" I am. I'm probably twice their age, but they don't know it. I smile. How could anyone mistake me as young as I hobble by, slightly hunched over from the morning injury?

On the last leg home that day I agree to take two freeloading passengers to the Kenya border town of Lokichoggio, and in the gesture make friends with a "security" official at the airport who was probably looking long and hard for a ride for his two friends. I had an empty plane going back, and, well, he asked nicely. After a half dozen handshakes, multiple thanks, and a little uneasy feeling that I had just contributed in some small way to the corruption of New Sudan, I was off; Through a haze of smoke lifting off the burning fields below, over a hundred and eighty miles of bumpy terrain skirting the border of northern Uganda, back "home" to the corner where these two countries meet up with mine.

Two Advil later my back feels better. Maybe the day's pain was a small reminder at the onset of this term that I am here by the grace of God, and that I live and breathe and fly by His strength. I can't imagine it has anything to do with my age.