Behind Windows

I recently traveled to Western Africa visiting Ghana and Nigeria with a group of admissions professionals.  I had never traveled on domestic airlines in a developing country before and the event described below happened after waiting in a non nondescript, non air-conditioned, over crowded gate area. All four daily flights to Abuja had been delayed and then forced onto 3 planes all on the tarmac at once late in the evening. In the chaotic rush after the call for boarding I had lost my colleagues and found myself telling the shuttle bus driver this was not my flight...

  “Just get on a plane”

He said to me, I couldn't believe it.

In the moment I really didn’t have much of a choice. In fact, it didn’t matter that this was not the plane for the flight I had a ticket for. It didn’t matter that I had no idea where my other 5 colleagues were, and it didn’t matter that I had no hope that I would ever see my luggage again.  I was sweaty, nervous and on an airport shuttle bus surrounded by tired, annoyed and angry Africans all just wanting to get on a plane and get to Abuja.  So I walked off that shuttle bus blasted by the steamy night; a collection of humidity, jet fuel and that high pitched whining of engines anxiously waiting to come to life.  I melted into the mass of people heading toward one of three planes on the airport tarmac in Lagos Nigeria at 10pm in the evening.  I did what any other exhausted American tourist, desperate to get to that next destination, would do, I got on the plane.

Sunrise over Boston

My 12 hour adventure to complete a 55 minute flight from Lagos to Abuja on Air Peace Airlines, (really that is the name), is something I will never forget.  It was but one piece of a wonderful trip to West Africa, to a place I’d never been.  However, my journey started in a much more familiar place, a hotel room in Boston, MA where Carney-Sandoe recruiting conference is held every year.  There 32 stories up I was able to witness the dawn through the window, the awakening of the city below.  An image that would be strikingly different from the view I would next experience out of my next hotel window in Accra, Ghana.

Accra, Ghana from my room window in the African Regent Hotel

One of the books I read on my trip was “A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles.  For those that don’t know, it is a book about Moscow in the early stages of communism in the 1920s and the main character “Count Rostov” lives in a grand hotel in the center of Moscow. Like the "Count" for most of my journey I was an observer of that around me, separated by hotel room, limo, and van windows. Fences, armed guards and the clear, transparent, protection of glass between me and the world that is Africa.

Through the window. Sheraton Hotel Lagos, Nigeria

But as in the book, where the “Count” is on house arrest in this hotel, not ever being allowed to leave, I too at times felt confined to my hotel or at least at arms distance of the cities of which I would visit.  While I am certainly not the first traveler that has felt trapped in a hotel, the "Count" and I also shared another similarity of our circumstances. Both of us were in reality captives of our privilege, it was at once our savior and our captor.  The “Count's" privilege kept him alive because he agreed not to leave the lavish confines of the Metropol Hotel and it was his lineage that gave him the luxury of being trapped inside ever looking out his windows.  For me, my privilege was that which comes from being an American traveling in West Africa.  My privilege allowed me to be safe from the threat of danger as armed security guarding the fenced in American hotels reminded me.  But it was the fact that I was an American that made it necessary for this security and that ever present threat of danger was made more apparent with the kidnapping of another group of school girls in the north of Nigeria while I was in Lagos.

What I found outside of my hotel room in Accra was not that much different than San Salvador or India, it didn’t surprise me. The feeling of being a minority in a country is hard to ignore,  I noticed that everywhere I went.  But while I was alone in my "whiteness", I was also surrounded by people who wanted to wish me well and sincerely wanted me to love their country as much as they did.

I now realize that as I was boarding the plane in the dark evening of that African night, I was not an American trapped by his privilege, unless I chose to be.  I could have tried to complain and demand an explanation of the situation, refusing to board that plane.  I could have allowed my privilege to trap me in that airport gate.  But I didn't as it has been my experience when traveling that there are moments that happen, moments of connection with people and cultures, moments to really view the village or city, if you are truly in a position to see them.  If you are looking and seeking for that connection. I do know that in those moments surrounding that flight to Lagos, I didn’t feel at risk personally and I think in part it was because the people around me all shared the common desire and in those moments I chose to see that in them.  We all just wanted to get on a plane and get to our final destination.

Walking along the road to the Airport in Lagos, Nigeria

I am not the most experienced traveler and I certainly have been fortunate in these experiences that I have had traveling.  Each time I return I am left with the feeling that we have so much more in common with those we encounter when traveling than what seems to separate us.  The genuine welcoming that is a smile on the face of a child, or the sincere hope that we are enjoying our stay are those interactions that transcend our privilege whether here in this community or in our travels throughout the world.

I've come to realize that it is only up to our eyes to see the possibility that awaits and to not let the windows we look through be barriers to what we can truly see.

Fruit seller, through the cab window, Lagos, Nigeria