Christmas in Africa

Six thirty Christmas Eve morning, pulling pitch on our sleek Italian AW139, pushing the nose over as the blades bite into the humid air, and soon the coral runway zips by beneath us, faster and ever faster and soon giving way to thick lush green African jungle.  We turn North towards Dar es Salaam and overfly the rusted sheet metal roofs of Mtwara, makeshift shacks arranged in an impossible, indecipherable pattern, the huts growing smaller and smaller, kids and goats and ladies wrapped in brightly coloured kangas carrying wood and water and fish along the intermingled red dirt paths, muddy and dark from the evening's rain, and soon it's the deep torqoiuse of Indian Ocean reef flashing in our chin bubble, but even that disappears as we climb into the clouds.

It turns into a very long day for various reasons, crowding the limits of our allowable duty, and we arrive back at our hotel tired and hungry.  Tough overcooked chicken, "chippies", and one lukewarm Ndovu beer later, I'm soon off to bed.  It starts not long after, the soft tapping of heavy drops of water on the hotel's tin roof, just above my head, and the intensity increases, and soon becomes a roar crowding out any capacity for thought.  Generally these deluges last for twenty minutes or so and head off over the horizon, but the sky flashes brightly and KABOOM!  The lightning and thunder assaults with an intensity I can hardly fathom, and if one were to let the imagination run free, you could easily imagine the end of days.  The room repeatedly flashes in bright purple light and the air seems to collapse as yet another crack challenges the roar of water on our tin roof, air rushing to refill the gap left by the massive discharge of electricity, the lightning often carrying some three million volts per metre.  It does not wane, but the intensity appears to surge as time rolls along, hour after hour and well into the morning, the tumultuous assault does not relent and one wonders how the earth could produce such energy.  The power is simply incredible and I have not experienced anything like it.  This is a storm!

Of course the electricity and internet were lost early in the eight hour tempest, and was still not available when I woke.  No calls to my family on Christmas eve. Christmas morning, I'm back at the hangar on SAR standby, having driven the company SUV through thick mud and three feet of water, the mosquitoes thick and the frogs croaking happily, drowning out the baying goats.  I'm still itching from jelly fish stings from a evening swim the day prior.  It doesn't exactly feel like Christmas, but I do my best, listening to a Christmas compilation I've burnt from the likes of Sonny Boy Williamson, Judy Brown, Lightning Hopkins, Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, John Lee Hooker, Sugar Chile Robinson, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Eartha Kitt and a host of other soul and blues artists from days long past, and I'm feeling kind of cool.   The power is now restored, but it's two in the morning in Eastern Canada.  I want to call, to touch base with home, but I know everyone is sound asleep.  I'm crossing my fingers I can talk to home later today, and wish them all a Merry Christmas.