As the plane gained altitude, Hanley watched the gauges, searching for any indication of problems. “You don’t have any Canadian geese around here, do you?” he asked.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one,” Jumma answered.
Turning southeast, Hanley pointed the plane in the direction of the mission. “Jumma, if you watch out the window, you will soon see the mission beneath us. I will circle overhead so you will get a good look. Then we’ll be on our way to Ethiopia,” he said. Jumma did not appear to have heard Hanley, staring out the window at the earth falling away beneath them. Then he nodded twice and gave Hanley a thumb’s up, never taking his eyes off the scenery below. After another minute, Jumma pressed the small red button and said thank you, his eyes still fixed on what was passing below them.
The mission soon came up in the distance, looking small and isolated, grouped together along a light gray squiggle of road appearing out of nowhere, returning to the same. Hanley kept the plane at one thousand feet, knowing there were no altitude restrictions in southern Sudan. As they passed over the mission, Hanley dipped the wings of the Beech, circled the mission once, then, setting course almost due east, began the journey to Ethiopia. He heard the click of the headset being keyed and Jumma’s voice saying, “The mission buildings looked like papers scattered along the road. I could see the people, like tiny bugs crawling among the papers. If people look like bugs to me, what do they look like to God?”
“Dust, I imagine,” Hanley said.
The start of the flight to the Jimma University’s hospital in Jimma, Ethiopia, was uneventful, the day clear, the air smooth, little turbulence to bother Jumma on his first flight. Hanley’s first trip was to gather supplies and meet the people he would be dealing with in Jimma. “I’m afraid I’ll say Jumma and not Jimma when I’m there,” Hanley said, smiling.
“Just say JU and they will understand you mean Jimma University,” Jumma said.
“Would you like to attend JU?” Hanley asked.
“Maybe, I don’t know,” Jumma answered.
Southern Sudan turned somewhat greener as they moved eastward, part of the East Sudanian Savanna, a large dry wooded area. The As Sudd, a swamp during the rainy season, was dry. This was not what Hanley had expected. In preparing for his journey, he spent most of his time researching the political environment, not the ecological. He thought of all of Sudan as being more of a desert, which the northern half certainly was. The terrain turned even greener as they moved eastward.
The Beech felt good, the heaviness of the vibrations and noise balanced by the lightness of the plane lifted and carried through the air. There were few clouds, but much haze below, the earth beneath them masked by it, the greens and browns fading as they rose to altitude. The flight would be approximately two hours.
Once trimmed, the Beech was a remarkably stable plane, requiring, in good weather, little adjustment during a short flight. Hanley would be contacting the Jimma airport within the hour, maybe a bit longer. The flight was going well so far, Hanley thought.
***
They were scheduled to depart for Mapuordit just after 3:00 p.m. Hanley waited in the small private aviation terminal to escape the African heat. Jumma sat nearby, leafing through the C-45’s flight manual, turning each page slowly.
The heat was on everything, an invisible coating of high temperature. The tarmac in the African sun felt like he imagined a hot stove top might feel through his boots. Sitting inside the terminal gave little relief. A copy of the International Herald Tribune, discarded by someone, a passenger or pilot, maybe an American, allowed him to catch up on world events. Reading the headlines, Hanley felt a small amount of panic, a tightening in his chest, as he again realized how removed from his family he was. As he read, he occasionally looked out across the airfield, the image of distance hills and trees altered by the shimmer of the boiling air.
The events in the newspaper were of the normal kind; a multimillionaire became the world’s first space tourist, a war criminal surrendered to the police, a spacecraft was still heading to Mars. It was the same self-absorbed bullshit that covered the front of every newspaper everywhere. He looked back to the distant hills, the low slopes all a uniform dingy plum color, the deeply burnt grass and shrubs darkened a grey by the dirty air, dust swept up to form a constant veil through which Africa was seen. From Egypt to Botswana and South Africa, he knew the view would be the same; sitting in any airport, he would see this continent through a dusty lens, the distance as obscured as its future. Africa was appealing and grim at the same time.
***
The airfield at Akot was forty minutes out. Hanley would start the routine, try raising the mission at Mapuordit, never easy, but necessary. The need for vehicles at the Mission meant he could not leave one at the airstrip, resulting in a wait for a ride back to the compound, sitting in the heat somewhere; in the plane was out of the question, even though it provided the most security. There wasn’t that much danger, the shifting presence of the militia and rebels always an uncertainty. Knowing where they were was never an easy task, information was slow and came through the flow of refugees from the northwest. The mission experienced little in the way of direct contact, the one instance, the killing of the young girl near the clinic, the major exception, and it was major. Seeing the girl, her head destroyed by what was probably a stray bullet, sickened him, frightened him more than he could have anticipated. He wasn’t prepared for it, but how could he
