Lifting Off: A Peace Corps Blog
* names were changed for confidentiality *
This is a story about waiting in a very large airplane before said airplane lifts off for a 20-hour flight from JFK International Airport to Aquino International Airport. And though it has nothing to do with the point of the story, you might be interested to note that both airports were named after assassinated political figures. The point of the story is being present.
We were us, all 79 of us Peace Corps volunteers, waiting on a tarmac in a 747, the largest plane in Delta's fleet. The waiting was really only an hour at most – the plane would slowly taxi a few hundred feet, stop for five minutes, taxi a bit more, stop again, and so on -- and the flight obviously took much longer and had a lot more happen. Nevertheless. Nevertheless, this story is about that hour.
The day before all that waiting we'd had Staging, which was seven hours of paperwork, policies, and logistics. And of course, the ubiquitous ice-breakers.
Mathias, a returned Peace Corps volunteer (RPCV) who'd served in Zambia, led our session. He spoke with a quiet, steady assertiveness, using a big flowchart flipchart to move us through all the policies and paperwork. And the first thing we went over were the aptly named Expectations for Staging. They were:
1. BE PRESENT
2. PARTICIPATE
3. BE PROACTIVE
4. BE PROFESSIONAL
We spent a solid fifteen minutes on these guidelines. Mathias prompted us with questions like "What do you think it means to BE PRESENT? and 'Okay, what else might it mean to BE PRESENT? and so on.
At intervals we did 'break out' activities. One activity, for example (one apparently focused on BEING PROACTIVE) involved making a flowchart on how to handle natural disasters. By that time, we'd been at this stuff for a few hours. My group titled our flowchart "Apocalypse Now." Step number one on our list, something we all agreed was quite important during a natural disaster, was "BE PRESENT." Our flowchart concluded with another very useful step: "BECOME BFFs WITH A SUPERHERO.”
Staging moved along and by the end of the evening most of us had had a quiet dinner and had returned to our rooms to catch a few hours of sleep before our 5am departure for JFK. That comparatively quiet evening, on the cusp of an indisputably momentous moment, was not what I had expected. But it was nice.
The following day, after we’d been bused to JFK and waited four more hours for our flight, we would find ourselves waiting on that plane, and I would spend that hour chatting in sleep-deprived excitement with my fellow volunteers and arranging my in-flight materials: MP3 player, moleskin notebook, inspirational reading (Three Cups of Tea), snacks, sleeping pills, ear plugs, blanket. And halfway through that hour, I would reflexively reach for something to redirect the impatience. My hands would settle on my trusty MP3 player (trusty except for the fact that the down volume button no longer worked), and I would almost randomly settle on a track from Karl Jenkins' Requiem. And suddenly something would happen--click on, lock in, zoom out--in that wash of symphonic chorale that muted the chatter and airplane babble around me.
Because when the music came on, suddenly, for the first moment time since I'd risen a little after 4 that morning to board bus, things didn't seem like a blistery-eyed blur. The bus ride through Manhattan had been a blur. The airport baggage line had been a blur. Wandering around the airport looking for ways to spend our Peace Corps-authorized $120 had been a blur. The airport breakfast, the getting to know each other better, the chatting with fellow volunteers about couch surfing, and college, and the Southeast, the debating with the three older male volunteers about the future of the publishing industry, about euthanasia, about luddism, and even the quick smalltalk with just about anyone (now that just about everyone was a familiar face), and the impromptu games of cards in Gate 6's waiting area, the taking advantage of the free wifi to use the internet for the last time before who knew when, the chance to make up on the sleep we'd missed the previous night with catnaps, or coffee, or both--all of that had been a blur.
Because suddenly I realized I was waiting in a very large plane, and I was listening to a chorus chant that "all the lasting things are grey," and I was looking around at my fellow Peace Corps volunteers, where, next to me, Lana munched on Gardetto's and homemade chocolate chip cookies that smelled irresistibly delicious, and next to her Christy was journaling in her notebook, and down the row Joseph was doing a crossword, and then I made eye contact with Lilac across the way, sharing what was either a somber knowing look about that momentous moment or just sleep deprivation, and behind me someone was reading a magazine, and in front of me another fellow volunteer was explaining to the elderly Japanese couple next to him what his "government organization" did ("It's about collaboration," I remember hearing him say), and ahead of me, Harold was snagging the final moments before lift-off to make a goodbye phone call.
And then I looked out the window at the approaching runway just as the chorus arrived and its climactic chant of a single word: Joy.
All of us, I thought to myself, all of us were waiting, somewhere between absence and presence, between going and being, between here and there, between home and away, between sleep and awake, between goodbye and hello, between reading and being read, between writing and being written: between.
And as cheesy as it sounds, in that moment I thought to myself: never again will I be leaving for the other side of the world as a newly minted Peace Corps volunteer.
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