Scribbles

“Stop”, I shout, “stoooop !”. Alf steps on the breaks of our Landcruiser. The boxes in the trunk shift forward violently. “Pull over, Alf, pull over!” “What, what is it?”, he shouts, as he maneuvers the car in between the people walking on the side of the road. “Coke. I saw bottles of Coke! There, in the window of the shop!”.
I jump out of the car and run to the shop. Indeed six bottles of Cokes stand in the shop. I step in, and the young boy behind the counter smiles and says ‘Hallo’ in German. I tell him I want the Coke bottles, all of them. I walk back to the car with my find. Coke at last!

It has been ten days since we arrived in Kosovo, and for 10 days, we have been eating what we could find. The only thing available was minced lamb, in all forms and shapes. Hamburgers, cevapcici sausages, small meatballs, large meatballs. Minced meat and bread. No vegetables, no fruits. Bread and minced meat. To drink, we could only find sparkling water and vodka. I don’t drink either.
Last night, out of sheer desperation, Alf, Richard and I dug into the survival kits we received at the warehouse. We found a camping cooker and bags of dried food in it. We pulled out the curry-rice combination, and cooked it in sparkling water. The pack had ‘Best used before 10-1989’ on it. That was ten years ago. But we did not mind. It took hours before the rice was cooked through. Richard, a Ugandan, is very picky with his food. He refused to eat it. Alf and I savoured it. At last something other than minced meat and bread. Even after hours of cooking, the rice was still pretty hard, but the spices gave it some flavour.
During the night, I thought ‘if I lit a match now, the room will ignite’. I had never farted that much in my whole life. I was rolled up in my sleeping bag, in an underground room, full of mould and dead insects, cold from the humidity. But still I had to pull away the sleeping bag, as I could not take my own smell anymore. These were not the occasional farts, but long blasts of gas. My stomach did not take the rice lightly. I could not stop laughing at myself, I giggled like an idiot, in between the farts.. Man, this was not normal anymore…

But now we had Coke.. At last, something with taste. The Real Thing. I am the happiest person on earth. Nothing can go wrong anymore.

We continue driving towards Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. It is the first time we would go to Pristina, after installing the office in Prizren for over a week. We are joining the rest of the team who had entered Kosovo out of Macedonia. Alf, Richard and I entered from Albania. There had been a healthy competition between the two teams, trying to complete the first office installation as soon as possible. We won –of course-.. Kind of. As we drove into town the first day, we saw a house with a WFP flag. No-one was there, so we took it for the WFP office. It was just days after Nato entered Kosovo, and there was chaos everywhere. We did not wait for the WFP field coordinator to come back from town, and started installing the computers, generator and the radios. We were the first ones to send an Email to all our colleagues: ‘We are online! Team Albania is online! We win!’. It did not matter that in the evening, the WFP coordinator came back with a puzzled smile on his face ‘Ah.. Here you are, guys. I have been looking for you the whole afternoon. But eh.. this installation is all nice, but eh.. this is not our office. Our office is on the other side of town..’ We never told the other team.. We won, we were the first on the air!! No matter we installed it in the wrong house. The next day, we took everything down, and moved it to the ‘real’ office. We never told anyone. Shht, let it remain a secret!

When we told the other team over the radio we would join them in Pristina, Mats had told me they had pizza there. The first restaurant in Pristina to open up after the crisis, and they made pizza! Now I have Coke, and in the evening, we would have pizza… This is a good day!
After driving for an hour over a road filled with potholes from the bombing, with Nato checkpoints every few miles, we can finally see Pristina laying in the valley.. It is getting dark, but splashes of light come from the valley. At first I thought it was fireworks, but soon we realize these are tracer bullets. We can hear the machine gun fire coming from town. From afar, we can see cars racing around, and masses of agitated people shouting and shooting in the air. Dozens of Nato helicopters hover low above the buildings with strong searchlights pointing down. Flares leave traces in the sky before floating down slowly, lighting up parts of town as if it were daylight. ‘No it is safe, they are just celebrating the end of the war’, Mats says over the radio, ‘Come on over, we’re waiting for you at the pizza place, on the corner of the main road, just past the second traffic light’.
We maneuver ever so carefully in between the shouting and cheering crowd. Many of them with AK47s in their hands, firing at will. I am a bit wary. What goes up, must come down also.. It is not the first time people get killed from stray bullets which were fired in the air. They bang on the side of the car. Not because they are angry at us. Just because the banging creates noise I guess. The Kosovars have, after all, been kept quiet for many years.
We join the team at the pizza place. ‘Pizzeria Napoli’, the painting says on the makeshift corrugated sheets, which surround an outside area filled with plastic tables and chairs. Everyone is there.. The whole WFP Pristina office. We are happy to see each other. It has been three weeks or so since we parted in Rome, not knowing how this emergency operation would work. Everyone was anxious to get going, and tonight we will celebrate a successful deployment with Pizza and Coke.. Life can be good. No matter that next to the thin corrugated sheets, crowds run by, shouting as if they were insane. From where we are sitting, we cannot see them. The corrugated sheets shelter our pizza-fest from the sight of the outside world’s craziness. We hear continuous blasts of AK47s, one meter from where we are sitting, at the other side of the fence. The gunmen are shooting and yelling as if they lost their mind. The helicopters hovering low overhead don’t matter. The flares don’t matter. The deafening sound of all the explosions don’t matter. The pizza has arrived and all we can think of is how simple life can be. Pizza, Coke and friends. A happy scene, lit by candles and tracer flares. For just a while, the outside world is outside. Outside the corrugated rusted fence. We are not part of it anymore.

Ciampino airport, Rome. Day 1 of the Kosovo re-entry.
‘Vaffanculo’, the pilot shouts, ‘Que putana de merda!’, as he pushes some buttons. The only thing we hear is a deep hesitating sound, which reminded me of my car refusing to start when we left the headlights on during the night. ‘Vaffanculo, vaffanculooooo’. The pilot is clearly an Italian, more so a Roman.

The problem with small planes is that you can see and hear everything going on in a cockpit. You’re sitting just a few inches away from reality. In a big commercial jetliner, it looks like all goes automatic. You can ‘Sit back, relax and enjoy your flight’. Our reality is a bit different at this moment. I don’t know why, but pilots that go off cursing and act all agitated don’t inspire a lot of confidence in me. I have no fear of flying, but I do not like to be reminded of the fact that flying an airplane is only part science. The rest is luck, skill, art, habit and experience. All very grey things if you ask me. A thin line between ‘to be or not to be’.. Looking at the co-pilot who is all sweating, I am sure that Shakespeare is not the first thing on his mind.

Reminds me of a flight in a small twin engine Beechcraft we once took from Mpulungu in Zambia to Entebbe Uganda. I was sitting just behind the pilot. And all of a sudden, in the middle of the flight, he goes ‘Oooooh shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,…’, while banking sharply to the left.. The co-pilot had just dozed off, his head bouncing slowly on his chest, with his headset sliding off his ears, woke up with a shock: ‘What, what?’ ‘Thunderclouds ahead. I don’t like to flying through thunder clouds in this small plane..’. I thought: ‘And how do you think this makes me feel, eh’.

There is no science in flying.. Ok, ok, ok, let me rephrase that. The basis is science, all the rest is nothing.. Luck. Thin air. A combination of random features. Sometimes I think ‘If someone up there decided this is my day to die, then there is nothing I can do.’ Especially with the flights we are taking. Bush flights. Control towers manned by amateurs, hardly paid, hardly interested, hardly equipped. We often use old Russian planes. A Russian pilot once told me that IATA rules stipulate pilots can not drink liquor less than 24 hours before getting onto the plane, and how that the rule was translated into Russian as ‘pilots can not drink liquor less than 24 paces before getting onto the plane’.

Meanwhile, we are still sitting with a bunch of relief workers cramped behind the Italian pilot who is getting more and more agitated. Cramped in a Learjet, one of those small fancy jets you see in the movies flying business people around. Or movie stars. When they told us yesterday, we would fly to Albania using a Learjet, we thought ‘Well, if we go, we might just as well go in style!’. Unfortunately, they had not told us this was the only plane available on charter. Every man and his dog apparently were flying into Albania and Macedonia since Milosovic had signed a treaty with NATO and pulled out of Kosovo.

A Learjet, hey?!.. Hmm.. We were cramped with too many people, sitting with our luggage in between us, on our knees, looking at the lights in the plane that dimmed each time the pilot pushed the big green button. A Learjet with dead batteries.

To kill time, and to make each other obviously more comfy, we exchanged horror stories of planes with the other relief workers in the plane. Stories of the Russian crew that shuttled between Kisangani-then Zaire and Kigali-Tanzania. Flying cargo in and refugees out. The Kisangani runway was a bit too short for the Ilutshin76 plane, so the pilot had to pull the brakes real hard. As soon as the plane stopped, a crew member would jump out of the plane and throw buckets of water on the tires to cool them off. On the same airport, an IL76 got stuck, because someone had forgotten to pull away the big wooden wedges blocking the wheels. So the pilot gave full throttle trying to get the plane to move. The massive jet wash this created, blew away the corrugated roof of the only hanger at the airport, and flattened all stalls of the local market just behind the plane.

Once approaching Kabul airport, our plane was forced to do a flyby. The pilot pulled up the plane as much as possible to avoid the mountain ahead. The plane then banked that sharp, people thought it was going to roll.. The pilot announced a few minutes later: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for this aborted landing. There was a guy with a bicycle riding on the runway. We’ll try again now’. Try? Try? How about giving some confidence, eh?

I once shared offices with Nigel, our UN flight coordinator. He had the best stories ever. Of the pilot who mistook the lights of the Corniche along the banks of the Nile in Khartoum, for the runway. And had landed neatly. Onto the Nile. Of the first approach at Kigali airport after the genocide. How the UN troops had said all was safe to land, and the pilot responded ‘and what are all those tracer bullets then, I can see flying towards my windscreen?’. Of the sign at Mwanza airport that said: ‘Beware of the potholes in the runway’. Of the loadmaster on the Russian cargo plane who was not briefed his IL76 was an ex-military plane, and had heavy armor plating on the bottom. He had loaded the plane full, like he normally did, making the plane too heavy. Nigel said they flew forever at just a few meters above the ground, leaving behind them a trace of huts and houses with caved in roofs. Guess the armor plating did work well after all…

Lacking a door between the passenger seats and the cockpit, we are witnessing a story which we will add to those string of anecdotes, I am sure. A cheap Italian comedy play. The pilot tries to call the control tower, asking for a start-generator, but the radio does not work either. Of course. Flat batteries, remember.. Even I knew that! He slides open the side window and shouts at a guy walking on the tarmac, past the plane. I seem to understand that with the flat battery, and some mechanical problem, he can not open the main door anymore. So we are all locked up. Stuck in a fancy Learjet, cramped with stuff under, next and on us, hot, stuffed air.
We, the passengers, the audience, are just sitting there, laughing our heads off. The pilot tries to ignore the laughter behind him, getting more agitated every minute. One of the passengers hands him a mobile phone. First he calls a friend to get the number of the airport. Then calls the airport, is put on hold, gets agitated, and in the end, speaks to the control tower. ‘Yeah, euh, this is flight UN23-4, can you find me a start-generator please? We are the white Learjet on the left from hanger number two.’ ‘No, my left, not yours’.. ‘No, no, the white one, not the silver one’. ‘Ok, look at hanger number two, I will wave through the window. You see me now? Yeah, a start generator. How much? Just a second’. And finally he turns to us. Asks if someone has some money. They ask him to pay for the use of the start generator in cash. He does not have enough on him.

Half an hour later, we are airborne.

Italians….

Postscriptum.
Three months later, I was still in Kosovo. I thought of this story and the jokes we made in the plane, when we got a radio call from our flight coordinator at Pristina airport. The sound of hesitation and trembling in his voice, his words will remain in my head for ever. ‘Please call the security officer. The control tower just informed me they lost our incoming flight on the radar.’

BBC World Wednesday, November 19 1999
Kosovo plane crash leaves 24 dead
Nato has confirmed that all 24 people on board an aid flight died when it crashed in northern Kosovo on Friday. The plane, chartered by the United Nations World Food Programme, came down 15km northeast of the town of Mitrovica.
A spokesman for the Nato-led peacekeeping force K-For said it was too early to speculate about the cause of the crash. He said it was extremely unlikely that the aircraft had been shot down by the Yugoslav military, despite the fact it had strayed into Serbian airspace.
The wreckage was found on a steep mountainside close to the Serbian border. The K-For spokesman said Nato troops had recovered the first bodies, and that the plane’s black box flight recorder had been taken intact from the wreckage.
The plane was located late on Friday after a search involving helicopters fitted with searchlights and infra-red equipment. The hunt had been hampered by the fear of mines and the difficult terrain.
The plane disappeared from radar screens at 1213 local time (1113 GMT). The WFP said that the ATR-42 plane had left Rome at 0900 (0800 GMT) on a daily shuttle flight to Pristina. The aircraft was reported to be carrying staff from the WFP, the UN Mission in Kosovo, various non-governmental organisations and a Canadian official.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has expressed his shock and sadness at the plane crash. “Once again men and women of many nationalities have had their lives cut short in the service of the United Nations, on a mission to bring relief to the suffering and peace to a war-torn community,” he said.

An investigation would show the crash was caused by a combination of human error and an equipment failure. Someone up there had decided it was their time.

‘Aaaaaaah’. With a long sigh of relief, I let myself slide into the soft cushions of a beach chair, next to Tine. In the shade of a huge umbrella, on fine sand, looking at the girls playing in the blue water next to the mangrove trees. The temperature is just right. Not too warm, not too cold. With cocktails in our hands.

‘Aaaaaah’. Zanzibar, at last. For weeks we had been looking forward for a long weekend off from work, in a different environment. With one sigh, gone were all the troubles and stress. Yesterday is just a distant memory. The flat tire we had with the office car on the way from Kampala to Entebbe airport, and the fact that the driver had forgotten to repair the spare, so we had to stop another car to hitch a lift to the airport to catch the plane on time. Gone were the memories of the crowded flight, the fact they managed to steal my spare mobile phone and electric shaver out of our luggage during the transit in Nairobi.

Our first long weekend together since a long while. Since probably the time we started up our new emergency intervention team at work, early that year.

I doze off. Wind blowing ever so slightly on my face. The sound of the waves on the beach. ‘Life should always be like that’, I think.

Very far away, in between the sound of the small, steady waves breaking onto the sand in a steady cyclic movement, I hear a faint sound, a high pitch tingling, a lovely sound. Tine squeezes my arm and pulls me out of my dream. ‘Phone! Your phone is ringing!’. Still half asleep, I dig into our bag with beach towels and pampers for Hannah. The office is calling. ‘A massive exodus from Kosovo refugees into Macedonia and Albania… Started yesterday.. Need to fly in… Equipment needed… Sorry to disturb your Easter weekend!’. Half awake, I hear everything but only grasp a bit.

I look over the blue-green Indian Ocean. The fishermen in the distance throwing out their nets in long circular movements, slowly pulling them in, and throwing them out again. My two angels within the frame of the same picture, more on the foreground, making a tower in the sand with their plastic shuffles, giggling, fantasizing it is the strongest castle ever built that will resist time and storms for ever. Tine is asleep again, in the chair next to me.

For a moment, this is my reality. My world. My happiness. I know though, from the moment I make my next phone call, another reality will kick in. Sitting in paradise, I will be thinking of the next days and weeks, where my reality will be interlinked with that of tens of thousands who lost everything they had on a moment’s notice, and are fleeing for their lives. On a moment’s notice… A moment like this. Where one is in paradise and the other one loses everything.

I come from no country, from no city, from no tribe.
I am the son of the road,
my country is the caravan,
my life is the most unexpected of voyages.

(From Leo the African by Amin Maalouf)

“I’m mad like hell and I am not going to take this anymore”
I remember it very well. Must have been somewhere mid 1991. I arrived home late from work one evening. I had a well paid management function in a respectable firm. I lived with Tine, my loving girl friend. We had two cars, two dogs, a flock of sheep, chickens and geese, on our villa-farm on the Belgian country side. The future looked bright. Nevertheless, that evening, as I sat in the car on the drive way, I did not feel happy. Some things were missing. It felt like at the age of 30, I had just finished my life. The plans for the future were all laid out so well. Autopilot from now on. But deep down inside, I hated corporate life and corporate politics that go with it. I hated wasting two hours of my life in traffic jams every day. And getting up every day at the same time, seeing the same faces every day, and dancing to the tunes of the people at work. Working my butt off until I could retire. I hated the limitations my job and life put on me.

African music played on the tape recorder, that night, as I sat in the car for what seemed like hours. I remember it very well. Just looking into the dark night. Listening to the exotic sounds, dreaming of exotic places. It suddenly darned on me: “This is not my life. Actually it is not a life at all”. Life is supposed to be creative. Variable. Free. Filled with the laughter of children, working with people one likes, working when one likes, doing what one likes. Going to places one likes. I wanted to do things so once, old and ready to die, I could take my grand children on my knee, and close my eyes, and look back on a life I could be proud of. A life that was filled with landmarks of what I had achieved, things I had done and seen. Things that would have an impact on the people around me, a positive impact.

As I got out of the car, I had made up my mind. “Something’s got to change around here”. I felt like on the movie “Network”, where a journalist encouraged people to throw open their windows and to shout “I am mad like hell, and I am not going to take this anymore!”. Well, I was not going to take this crap anymore!

Breaking the chains.
The first sign of madness was my spontaneous decision to participate in an expedition to Clipperton, a deserted island in the Pacific. Decided one day, gone on expedition three weeks later. It was a spiritual experience. For the first time since very very long, I felt deeply happy. I sat laid back, in the middle of the night, looking at the Milky Way in the middle of the Pacific, with palm trees waving in the moon light, listening to the music of Enya playing in my head over and over again. Completely sun burned to the second degree, dizzy because of the lack of sleep. But happy. I was doing what I wanted to do. I found part of my destiny, it seemed.

Once I got back to Belgium after the expedition, my job looked even more dull than ever. I needed another shot of adrenaline. The shot came one year later. Another expedition to the Pacific. This time, it was to an island called Howland. Guess you never heard of that one. Well, I did not neither. And what an adrenaline shot it was. A team of great people, each one still being a close friend today. A trip where I almost drowned in a stormy see. A trip during which I learned to love the Pacific. A trip where we lived on survival mode, using the very limited food and water provisions we had for almost a week waiting out the storm which made it impossible for us to leave the island with the small rubber dinghies we had. What more can one do to lead an intense life?

As we had trouble getting off the island, I arrived back at work one week too late. My boss schmuttered some remarks like “that is typical you again, is it not? Always trying to do the unconventional.”. Well he was right. And almost on the spot, I asked for 2 months leave without pay, for the next year, as I wanted to go to the Antarctic. He said no. I did the only sensible thing to do: I quit my job. That was June 1993. Since then, things have only been improving. Ha!
For one year, I did not have a paid job. But I enjoyed working home. I wrote a book. About past expeditions. Mostly for myself. And worked on the preparations for our expedition to an Antarctic island called Peter I (rather appropriate name, don’t you think?). Only then, I started to feel what the word ‘freedom’ meant.
We did the “Peter I expedition”. When I left home for the Falklands, where a Russian icebreaker would pick us up, I told Tine: ‘I do not know when I will be back. Might be in two or three months, but do not worry!”.

We are now fifteen years following that one night when I took my decision to quit my well protected life and to go on a totally different route, Since then, I have done several missions for the IFRC – International Red Cross: twice in Angola, twice in Malawi and one in Ivory Coast. Later on, I took over Paul’s job in Goma, Zaire –now DRC-, working for UNHCR, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The first two years I worked as a consultant, spending half of my time in Belgium, with Tine and Lana, our first born.

Early 1996 I was offered a job by one of the UN humanitarian agencies in Kampala, Uganda. Kampala became my base for four years. First I worked as a telecommunications officer in the regional office of our organisation. Later I was promoted as the head of the regional Technical Support Unit. We looked after a vaste area covering Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Congo-Brazzaville.
After a second expedition to the Antarctic in 1997, Tine and Lana joined me in Uganda. Hannah, our second daughter joined us too. Two weeks old and already in Africa, probably marked her as a life long traveller.

Mats, another fellow radio amateur, joined our team, and together we founded FITTEST, which over the years grew to be the UN’s fast intervention support team. Side by side we have assisted in most of the humanitarian crisises in the world since 1997.

In 1999, I moved to Kosovo, and then to Islamabad, Pakistan. Tine said ‘she would rather be alone in Belgium than alone in some remote country’ and moved back to our home base. I started to work two months on and one month off, shuttling between home and work. A good decision it seemed afterwards, as with its global coverage, the work with FITTEST took me to well over a hundred countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific, South and Central America. The funny thing was that once I got home, my ‘girls’ wanted to travel, so I was never really ‘home’ in Belgium for the past ten odd years.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we started our office in Dubai, where I worked until 2006.The office grew into one of the main UN humanitarian fast response facilities. Be in the midst of the Balkan’s crisis, the 9/11 fall out in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the tsunami, the refugee crisis in Darfur, or the Pakistan earthquake, we were always on the frontline of the activities, calling ourselves the ‘special forces’ of the humanitarians. ‘Fast is good, First is better’, was our motto. Work was always presenting new challenges and had many sudden twists and turns giving us sleepless nights and exciting days, to say the least.

In 2006, I decided to take a thirteen months’ sabbatical, so I could spend more time with my family, and do a bit of sailing. Taking that distance, I realized that as years flew by, my path crossed that of many people. Many situations came up unexpectedly, leading to funny, sad, moving or weird stories. I started to write them down. Some were published in magazines, some I wrote as Emails to friends, some I just jotted down for myself and some stuck in my memory.
During my sabbatical, I started this blog as an eBook, as a string of these stories.

Mid 2007, I started my new job, still as a humanitarian, but this time working in our Rome headquarters. But the blog continued. I added some stories of the travels I did with the family, sailing stories, and later on expanded with news items. All of them form “the tales while travelling The Road”, my “Road of Life”, my “Road to the Horizon”.

I dedicate these stories to Tine, Lana and Hannah, my “three girls”, under the motto: ‘It is easier to be a nutcase than to live with one’. Their love has kept me going.

A sincere thanks to Els and Ekram for the work they have done on the short stories, for their relentless editing, their encouragement and tips.

Peter.
peter(at)theroadtothehorizon(dot)org