journey home

The journey began in Belo at 7am as Lance and I boarded our first of 6 vehicles of transportation in our 42-hour journey home. The hour-long taxi-ride was uneventful enough – the usual discomfort of 8, smelly bodies piled into 1 tiny car (including 1 passenger sharing the seat with the driver) and large amounts of poisonous exhaust pouring from the engine into the vehicle through the air vents. This is “normal” in Cameroon.

The taxi delivered us to the bus station where our 9am departure time would soon become 12:30 – thanks to the usual hang-ups including a heated, 30-minute debate of whether 1 particular passenger would be allowed on the bus. Once 12:30 came, we were off on the 7 hour-journey to Douala (the departure city of our flights home), but then 12:45 came, and we found ourselves sitting in a long line of vehicles parked in the middle of the road.

Apparently, they were doing road construction, and we all needed to wait for them to finish before we were going anywhere. Thankfully, we waited less than 30 minutes (quite short relatively speaking) before we were off again. Thankfully also, the bus wasn’t infested with cockroaches like on our journey to the village, but we were periodically bitten by tiny ants throughout the ride.

Once our bus reached Douala, we hired a taxi to drive us to the airport, and 4 hours later, we were on our first of 3 flights toward home.

Our first flight began with the desperate sounds of bloody terror that only a baby can produce – or 2 babies, to be exact. For the first 30 minutes of our flight from Douala to Brussels, the baby sitting in the row directly behind me and the baby sitting in the row directly in front of me competed to prove who the more tortured, possessed victim was.

By the time our meal was served, both children had fallen asleep. Soon afterward, I also fell asleep only to be repeatedly awakened by my Cameroonian neighbor whose sense of personal space proved to be different from mine in the way that she sprawled herself into “my” space. I finally made peace with the shared space between us and fell into a deep sleep. Minutes later, I awoke slowly to the feel of something warm on my foot. Once I was able to open my eyes fully, I realized that my neighbor had vomited on me. Yep. Vomited. On me. We still had 26 more hours of traveling, and I was covered in vomit.

The good news is that I had covered myself with one of the airline blankets, so the only part of me that really had puke on it directly was my sock. I felt so bad for this woman next to me. She was still vomiting, and she didn’t know about the puke bag in the seat pocket. So she pulled out her tray table and just continued to do it there. But it was going all over the place – including all over herself. I felt SO bad for her. I also felt nauseous.

I went to the bathroom to wash my hands and breathe my way through my own nausea and returned to the news that I was being moved away from the vomit-soaked seats and into business class. I spent the next 4 hours completely horizontal in a deep sleep in a massive seat (which included a massage function!). I thought, “I’m not sure if this was worth getting puked on,... but I think it was.” 16 hours down. 26 more to go. And I’ll be home.