The flight in

I am on the second leg of my 3 step trip to Calabar. The first flight from NYC to London was uneventful besides having to wake up at 5am after a restless sleep. My mind was going a mile a minute regarding work items I still had to complete on my flight as well as the excitement about finally after three months of planning and training actually heading out on my Corporate Service Corps assignment destination!

As I was sitting on the plane putting the final touches on some work I was finishing for Mary I started poking around some of my other emails – it was then that I discovered a terrible truth…I had sent Suzanne and Santa the wrong spreadsheet last night. So the first thing I did was search my hard drive to see how I could possibly have attached the wrong spreadsheet after having worked on it for about 4 hours the night before....that was when the horror started to set in – somehow the file I had worked on ALL NIGHT was GONE!!! I searched all over my hard drive for 30 minutes as my temperature rose…but in the end it was in fact gone. I had to start the whole thing over again. The only silver lining was that I was stuck on a plane for the next 6 hours – and yes I worked on that spreadsheet for over half the flight. After getting that done I was frantic to get any sort of internet connection in London before getting on another plane for 6 hours so I could quickly send Suzanne and Santa a message that I had redone the spreadsheet.

I was able to get a connection at the airport and then ran to the gate to meet my some of my team for the first time. Ryan, Jolanta, Henri and Yvonne were all there – it was like meeting my long time pen pals for the first time! We pulled a stranger over for our first picture together and were off to board our next flight (see second photo above of Ryan, Jolanta, Henri and Yvonne in the Abuja airport).

This leg of the trip was my first expose to pieces of Nigeria. The women were extravagantly dressed in colorful one and two pieces dresses, some with matching scarves wrapped around their heads. The outfits are beautiful. In addition there are many men dressed in full suits for this long 6 hour flight to Abuja....interesting that they would rather look good than be comfortable. I finally get to my seat at the back of the plane through much noise and chatter as people were finding their seats and packing far too much luggage into the overhead compartments. There was a man in my seat that moves and proceeds to complain to the flight attendant about his seat for the next 15 minutes – he later moves – I again have a free seat beside me (same thing happened on the first flight). There was then another confrontation with another gentleman as the flight attendant asks him if he would not mind moving so the person beside him could sit with his wife – he did in fact mind and made a big fuss about moving. This was a very different atmosphere than the first flight....I hope this is not an introduction to how things are going to be for the next month….displeasure and confrontation...

The other thing I notices was the tremendous amount of wealth in the business class section of the plane – I lot of Louis Vuitton and gold jewelry. I guess this is the 30% of the population that does not live on less than $1/day. From a fashion perspective the LV bags were a few season’s old in most cases but not all (see photo below of Women with this season's LV and great yellow pumps in the Abuja airport). I am curious what sort of footwear is worn with the loud and colorful outfits the women wear – I will have to take a peak and see if there are a pair of Jimmy Choo’s under there....