Bill Bryson's African Diary - Bill Bryson [10]
“But the kids,” I said. “They have no future.”
“I know,” he said sadly. “I know.”
Later, as we walked through the camp, Dan pointed out a nifty self-closing tap on a standpipe in the school grounds and told me that Nick had designed it, though he was too modest to say so. Nick, it turns out, is a water engineer by training and the tap was one of his first projects in Africa. You can find them all over Africa now, Dan told me.
Interestingly, nearly all the field workers for CARE were trained to do something else. David Sanderson was an architect before he became an aid worker. Adam Koons, whom we would meet in another day or so, was formerly a photographer on Madison Avenue in New York. A fellow working in Uganda for CARE in a previous life designed the round tea bag.
“People who work in the field are different from most of the rest of us,” Dan said as we strolled along. “They live far away from their friends and families in places like this that are generally difficult and often dangerous, trying to help people they don’t know to have better lives. Pretty remarkable really. Could you do that?”
“No,” I said.
“Neither could I.” He was thoughtful for a minute. “But then I’d never have thought of the round teabag either.”
Late in the afternoon we returned to the airstrip for the 90-minute flight to Nairobi. I asked Nino what the weather was like there.
“I’ll let you know when we get closer,” he said vaguely, as if he weren’t sharing all he knew.
Ten minutes before we arrived in Nairobi I found out why he was being coy. Ahead of us was a storm. It looked big. The thing about sitting near the front in a small aircraft is that you can see everything—to left, to right and straight ahead. None of it looked good.
We were over the outer suburbs of Nairobi and some way into our descent before we hit any turbulence—and it wasn’t too bad. It didn’t feel as if the wings were going to fall off or anything. But then the rain came—suddenly and noisily in staccato fashion. It was as if the windscreen were being pounded by wet bullets. Maybe it’s always like that in cockpit and you just don’t know when you are in a separate compartment further back, but this was most assuredly unnerving. Worse, after a minute it became evident that Nino couldn’t see a thing. He began to move his head from spot to spot around the windscreen, putting his nose to the glass, looking for any tiny bit of visibility. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t put the windscreen wiper on, then looked more closely and saw there wasn’t a windscreen wiper. I glanced across at Nick and we shared a single telepathic thought: There’s no windscreen wiper!
Actually two thoughts: There’s no windscreen wiper and we’re all going to die!
Nino was now bobbing around in his seat in the manner of someone who is trying to land an airplane while being attacked by fire ants. It appeared that from looking out the side window he could get a very rough fix on our location, but only very rough evidently because twice he banked very sharply, as if swerving out of the path of a big building or something. This was rapidly becoming worse than my worst nightmare.
But still he pressed on. For one long minute, nothing much happened. We just flew forward in a seemingly straight line, continuously descending. When we were some small distance above the ground—70 or 80 feet, say—and there was still nothing to be seen in front of us, I was pretty comfortably certain that we were going to die in the next few seconds. I remember being appalled, peeved even, but nothing more than that.
And then bang—and I use the word advisedly, of course—right before us, rushing at us at a ridiculously accelerated speed, was a runway. Nino tilted the plane and dropped us with the sort of suddenness that made our hats rise off our heads. We landed hard and decidedly off center, and for a long moment—the one truly frightening