No More Sandbox!!!

After an unexpected delay I finally made it out of Sudan!! I was supposed to leave on Friday morning but I woke up sick on Thursday and had to postpone my flight for a day but I did make it. I don't know why I was surprised by the delay...typical Sudan giving me a a little last reminder of just exactly why I should be excited about leaving.

The airport was fun too. I had a 5:45am flight so I arrived at the airport at 3:30am to find a complete zoo. I didn't check my bags in until 5am, but then again neither did anyone else. They don't have computers and all the check-in guys had hand written passenger manifests so every time someone checked in that desk agent had to go to all the other desks and cross them off everyone else's passenger list. Ridiculous.

But the entire airport was aware of the problem so they didn't even look at my form when they waved me through immigration and they barely glanced at my passport as they rushed me through passport control.

Then I ran into a line about 100 people long to go through the security check to get to the gate. We have a small airport and there are 2 metal detectors to get to the 3 gates. Since there were 2 flights at the same time there were 2 really long lines. Then my flight's metal detector breaks so they tell my line of 100 angry people to 'merge' with the second line of 100 angry people.

I thought there would be a riot. Men were yelling, people were fighting, it was crazy. There were women and children in the middle of all this, so to help them out the security people announced that they would let the women and children come around to the side of the line, not anything abnormal. But that just made the men even more angry.

Finally they just let everyone go through the metal detector without checking anyone!!! I'm no expert on airport security or anything but I definitely feel like there is something wrong with that picture. I guess there just 'wasn't enough time' to try to make sure terrorists didn't carry weapons on the planes.

My flight was an hour delayed because the K-town airport couldn't get their act together, but no surprise there. When the plane lifted off I realized that, in that moment, I was getting my last glimpse of Sudan. I kind of pictured my departure as being this bittersweet, emotional moment but I found that I couldn't be sad because I was still perturbed/angry over the airport situation...I will NOT miss times like that.