The Hospitality Lounge

Flight 0707 on Cameroonian Airlines was delayed for 18 hours, because, according to the CamAir staff at 9am on Sunday morning (we were supposed to leave at 3:30pm on Saturday), there was no fuel and no money to purchase fuel. Anna and I spent these 18 hours lying on the pealing couches in Cameroon Airline's Hospitality Lounge, or curled up, shrimp like, on faux plastic pebbles at the gate waiting for the plane to arrive from Bamako. The cast of the Hospitality Lounge: a group of six South Africans who had come to Cameroon for a religious convention -they called each other Mama this, and Papa that- hosted by Rebecca Brown and had been waiting for two weeks(!) for their return flight to Johannesburg. They had no more money and so were camped in the Hospitality Lounge indefinitely. They were, quite justafiably, enraged; and wandered between the lounge and an office in the hall, waiting for a manager -who never did appear- to materialize, enumerating outrages inflicted upon them by Cameroon Airlines, and yelling at the staff who either ignored or laughed at them. Oh, and to make a murky story even darker, one woman in the religious "delegation"'s husband had died a week earlier in South Africa while she was stranded in Cameroon, and she needed to get home for the funeral. All of them, especially the new widow, displayed, what I considered, a super human self control in not maiming the CamAirlines Staff. Those people should be issued riot gear with their uniforms. There were also two sailors from India trying to get to harbors before their ships sailed in Libreville. One of them was the ship's cook and specialized, I perused his photo album during those long hours, in constructing decorative breads in the form of tropical fish and mermaids. He had a very thick, and thuroughly stamped Passport that I coveted. Anyways, all of this made my breakdown, when I finally began to cry and pleaded, sobbing with a man behind a computer at the gate that, "I absolutely could not stand this anymore!" seem pretty melodramatic.