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Uganda: Airport Frenzy
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New Vision (Kampala)
COLUMN
5 July 2008
Posted to the web 7 July 2008
Moses Opobo
Kampala
I have been to Entebbe International Airport quite a few times of recent. Not because I have been on a globe-trotting spree. Rather, to witness the home-coming of budding musical celebrities-in-the-making, fresh from a musical expedition in a neighbouring capital.
Although I am born, bred and actually still reside in Entebbe, it had been a while since I last visited the home to the big birds. Hence when I did visit a couple of times recently, I made the kind of observations you ordinarily would have expected only from a first time visitor to the place.
If you want to see just how emotional human beings can get, then head to Entebbe International Airport, or any airport at that. While there, station yourself strategically at either of two places; the arrivals lounge, or the departures lounge.
For my case, and the rest of my colleagues from the press, it had to be the arrivals lounge. Since I did not have any personal attachment to the people we were receiving, I did not see reason why I had to jostle for breathing space with the mass of humanity that had descended upon the arrivals lounge as soon as the Kenya Airways flight touched down on the runway.
However, if you know the curse of the journalistic profession, you will be sure that I was just kidding myself. I was curious to know, to see, to feel, to capture the eclectic moment in my memory.
It is not always that I encounter such an irritable, restless, over expectant, even selfish lot of people as those you will meet at the arrivals lounge of Entebbe Airport.
Singly, or in groups of two-to-five people, they stand there, with naked impatience, their eyes glued to the direction from which their loved ones are supposed to show up.
If you have seen a picture of those stock brokers, with eyes puffed from stress and lack of sleep, firmly affixed to the London or New York stocks, then you know what I'm saying.
At this point in time, every body is so selfish that all they need is the best vantage point from which to capture the magic moment, even if this is in utter violation of other peoples' space.
There is one category of these people that is particularly irritating and unmistakable. They usually come alone or in twos, holding a placard with their name or that of an organisation they represent.
It is obvious they would have come to pick up somebody whom they have never met before, hence the name-bearing placard.
It would seem that these people accord themselves the dignified status of some VIPs of sorts, with absolute right of way. Immediately the first person shows up carting their luggage to the lobby, they start to shove forward, in the process pushing every living soul in their way aside.
They will only stop this when they are standing right in front of every one. They then raise their placards up, and start on the long wait.
There is just something about that magical moment when people get to unite with their loved ones back from a foreign trip. It is the same with the time when people say those magical last words before a loved one boards a plane.
Everybody slips into emotional overdrive, and an inexplicably heedless, unrestrained state of mind. It is as if it is some form of rat race, in which the goal is to be the first to see one's person, failure of which would render the trip down to the airport meaningless!
This is the perfect time and place to tell one person's character from another, although, in a way, every one gets to behave in more or less the same way. You can tell the bully, the selfish kind, the rash, the pushy, the laidback
What perplexes me most is not so much the excitement and the emotions that run through peoples' veins at this moment. Rather, it is the fact of how fleeting a feeling this excitement usually is.
For most of these people, the excitement starts on a steady downward spiral immediately after the mandatory heart felt three-part hug, and the accompanying pleasantries.
I watched one such scenario as part of the press team that received a young lady back from a music talent competition in Nairobi recently.
Her entire family - a mother and seven siblings were at hand to receive her. No need to repeat the procedure about how they descended upon the arrivals lounge to receive their loved one.
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However, no sooner had they hugged and exchanged pleasantries, than everybody went silent. All they could do was look awe struck behind the newly-found media celebrity for whose attention the press was jostling!
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