Africa 2010 - Across the Wasteland

February 7th, 2010

We have been in the plane for 4 hours now, from London to Nairobi. It is comfortable, lots of legroom, good food with the classic British Airways tending to details. A half-full cup of cranberry juice sits by my side as I type. Through a speckled window over my shoulder, I have been snapping photos of the journey south. My first glimpse of something other than clouds showed the French Alps, rising to and through the low, spotty cloud cover. I quickly grabbed my point and shoot and snapped a record. The in flight trip map showed Marseille and Montpellier. After a bit over the water, I saw land to the left, curling South. It was Cagliari and Carbonara, in the Mediterranean Sea. Then another look showed the African coast. We were in Africa! We flew almost directly over Tunis and Tripoli, then curled Southeast into the desert. The landscape continued to get dryer and brown. We flew through and above a hazy sand storm, definitely not clouds or mists – it was too fine and that light tan color of the desert. Another look later showed that we had entered the Saharan desert. Sand dunes, snaking North to South created valleys and swirling refuges, but the look and feel was incredibly foreign and inhospitable. It truly appears as if no life could even be sustained in the wastelands of the desert below. About this time we have dropped South of Cairo and the tombs of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. It is an ancient and barren land. There is not a green, blue, or white thing in site – it is sea upon sea of sand. And I fly at 37,000 feet in a hollow metal people-mover, sipping my cranberry juice. In Libya 37,000 feet below me are the people of the desert travelling to the only water for a hundred miles.

I have an enormous sense of awe right now, in the complexity and vastness of it all. How many caravans have traversed that wasteland? Does anyone on this hollow metal tube give much thought to the scraping survival down there? Is unchecked power of enslavement checked with righteous application of grace, dignity, and capable love?