21 September 2005 – Pretzels make me thirsty

The trip to Bujumbura has not gotten off to a rollicking start.

To begin with, I’m still in Kigali, which, for those of you not geographically inclined, is the capital of Rwanda, not Burundi.

Yesterday afternoon, after I called to confirm my flight to Bujumbura at 2:05 pm today, I said to Rebecca, “I’m glad I did that because the last thing I want to have happen is that scene from Seinfeld, where he’s trying to get the rental car.”

“You see you know how to take a reservation, but you don’t know how to hold a reservation,” Jerry says to the reservation agent, “and really, that’s the key to the reservation. Anyone can just take a reservation.”

Well, these pretzels are making me thirsty.

I had received confirmation, in French, that my name was on the passenger manifest. And anyway, when one books a ticket through a travel agent, one expects them to make sure you’re on the list. That’s the point of the agency, isn’t it?

I arrived at the Kigali airport at a little before noon for my two p.m. flight. That was the suggestion the travel agent gave to me. It seemed early to me, but it was my first time flying out of Kigali, so I wanted to follow instructions. I got to the counter, where a friendly agent named Goodwin said welcome to AirBurundi, but your name is not on the list.

“What do you mean,” I asked. “I got the confirmation yesterday over the phone. I did it in French. They told me that I was on the list. Did you hear me? I did it in French.”

“But you’re not on the list,” he said, escorting me away from the counter, where I considered reaching for the hand-written list to scratch out someone else’s name and replace it with my own. He must have seen me eyeing it. Or maybe it was that he didn’t want the steam coming out of my ears to singe the rest of the travelers.

So he sat me down, and said he wanted to find out whose fault this was – the travel agent or the airline. It didn’t matter to me, I wanted on that plane. I even filled out my exit card in front of Goodwin, explaining that come hell or high water, I was flying to Bujumbura this afternoon. He smiled a bit and walked away. The important meetings I had set up didn’t really matter to him at all.

He returned, and wanted to know if I understood him when he explained the situation – that I was not on the list and despite my confirmed reservation was flying standby. “I understand the words coming out of your mouth. I understand the language,” I said. “But I’ll never understand why I was told yesterday that my name was on the list when it clearly wasn’t.” This flew over his head.

After talking to Rebecca – who, as always, has been a trooper throughout this whole ordeal – I decided to ask Goodwin if he could call Entebbe, the airport my flight originated from. I wanted him to check whether the flight was full, and how many people were continuing from Kigali to Bujumbura.

He picked up his phone, looked at it, and said with a straight face, “Can I use your mobile phone. I’m out of minutes.”

“No. You work here. You have an office. Doesn’t it have a telephone?”

He stopped, considered my apparently faulty logic, and went and played with his camera-phone with a coworker. As he smiled and mugged, I sat and stewed on a metal luggage counter. I text-messaged Rebecca, and she said that she was sorry to say it, but that was kind of funny.

Anyway, when the flight I was supposed to be on landed, Goodwin came back down and gave me the news I had expected: the flight was full. Neither hell nor high water came, but I was still not flying to Bujumbura this afternoon. I called Joelle, the Burundian who is helping me with all of my arrangements there, to say I wouldn’t be arriving until tomorrow, but that it was AirBurundi’s fault – in the end they said I was on the plane when I wasn’t. She must think I’m a moron.

Bec came and picked me up from the airport, a fifteen-minute drive from where we live and she works, and dropped me off at the AirBurundi office. “Give ‘em hell,” she said when she dropped me off. After yelling, pointing and looking like a fool, I got myself booked on a flight that leaves Kigali at 9 a.m. tomorrow. And it is confirmed.

This trip could be the make-or-break point of our adventure here. It’s my first chance to write for a major metropolitan daily newspaper, and if I do it well, I can probably count on a lot more. Success breeds success, they always say. So I guess that it’s only fitting that so far everything’s gone wrong. I just have to rise above it, and I have no doubt I will.

I’ve also learned a few things. The first, as if I needed more confirmation, is that Rebecca is the most patient and loyal supporter I could have. I don’t know where I’d be without her. The second is that I should make sure I confirm things in person here, because I can imagine the woman on the phone filing her nails, looking at a magazine and saying, “Yeah, yeah, you’re on the list.”

And, I get to go to my French class tonight. Here I thought I was going to miss the whole first week.

Next time you hear from me, I will be home from Burundi, slaving over my Pulitzer-winning story for DaMN. (The acronym DaMN uses on its contracts is TDMN. How boring.)