Is this home?

My last post was written in a sense of despair of going back to Africa. All the problems and all the problems. And the flight was pretty horrible, not that it was bad, it's just that sitting or even being in the aluminum tube for 11+ hours is not my idea of nice. The service was good, the food reasonable, the entertainment banal, the seat OK, but, watching that moving map thing creeping across the Atlantic is just too much.

We crossed onto the continent over Dakar, sliced off the east end of Gambia, and curved around the backside of West Africa. Just south of Bamako, I think that I could see the lights through the haze, can't imagine any other source that big. Well south of Ouagadougou as we cut off the top third of Ghana and turning further south towards the coast. To me anyway, these names just roll off the tongue and I was getting excited.

The pilot adjusted course to go north of a big storm system over Togo, and then we turned back south. This really messed up the moving map thing and it started showing increasing times to our destination. Almost due south over Ibadan, west of Oshogbo, and over Abeokuta into LOS.

Sunday morning is a good time to come into Lagos but there were some differences too. The immigration queue was more organized and faster. The porters were decked out in blue vests indicating some form of organization. The money changers were polite and the traffic light. (N155 per $1). It looked like the taxis were getting organized too.

It's amazing how I just fell back into it. I could say "God Bless" to the beggars and they weren't pushy. I could step right through the parking lot traffic as the unwritten rules required without fear of being hit. I knew how to engage the money changer to get a quote and get away without entanglement. I stayed in the shade.

Today I went shopping with Jesse (driver) and caught up on events while I was away. There was the little matter of the shootout at our dock where the 6 kidnappers were killed trying to get away with their N30,000,000 ransom. But I had missed all that and to celebrate my good fortune gave N5 to the leper who sits near the front of the "New Market" and has become my regular tithe. For that price I get a blessing too.