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Dust devils swirled on the lonely air strip.
Across a chain link fence, I could see the sheltered hangars with their fighter jets shrinking from the pounding sun. American foreign aid at work.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I was a mere 12 miles from the Sudanese border, and Wadi Haifa.
I didn't go further South.
I absorbed what I had come to see, and then waited for the plane. It was old. Incredibly old. When planes become too old, and unsafe, for North American airspace, they get sold to poorer African countries for use in domestic flights. This was one of those planes. There was no boarding ladder. They popped open the emergency exit that had its own stairs out of the back of the jet.
As we ducked into the anus of the decrepit aircraft and took our seats, a stray dog ran up the stairway and down the aisle of the plane. A uniformed flying staff gave it a kick and sent it running just as quickly back to where it came from.
The northbound flight cut across dunes and expanses of sand. Egypt is a snake frying in the heat of the desert. Its mouth slurps greedily at the pool that is lake Nasser. Its gullet produces food for millions as the water creates first electricity at Aswan, and then food and a highway until the delta. The jets at Abu Simbel and at Aswan are there for a reason. Destroy Aswan, and an entire nation is vomited into the sea.
Across a chain link fence, I could see the sheltered hangars with their fighter jets shrinking from the pounding sun. American foreign aid at work.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I was a mere 12 miles from the Sudanese border, and Wadi Haifa.
I didn't go further South.
I absorbed what I had come to see, and then waited for the plane. It was old. Incredibly old. When planes become too old, and unsafe, for North American airspace, they get sold to poorer African countries for use in domestic flights. This was one of those planes. There was no boarding ladder. They popped open the emergency exit that had its own stairs out of the back of the jet.
As we ducked into the anus of the decrepit aircraft and took our seats, a stray dog ran up the stairway and down the aisle of the plane. A uniformed flying staff gave it a kick and sent it running just as quickly back to where it came from.
The northbound flight cut across dunes and expanses of sand. Egypt is a snake frying in the heat of the desert. Its mouth slurps greedily at the pool that is lake Nasser. Its gullet produces food for millions as the water creates first electricity at Aswan, and then food and a highway until the delta. The jets at Abu Simbel and at Aswan are there for a reason. Destroy Aswan, and an entire nation is vomited into the sea.