How can I forget the woman sitting beside me? We did not exchange any words for the 6 ½ hours of the flight from JFK in New York to Blaise Daigne in Senegal, but I will never forget her.
She seemed like an older woman maybe in her late 50s or early 60s. She seemed frail. She was occasionally mumbling to herself. I did not know how to understand her. She was not ill but something didn’t seem quite right and she was travelling alone. As soon as the plane took off she feel asleep and I fell asleep. I woke up when the lights came on for the cabin crew to serve meals. She didn’t wake up. The man serving the meals gave me a meal without asking me what I wanted? I knew they had options because I heard a female hostess in the other aisle give people options to choose from. I told him what I wanted. He changed it and was about to move away without serving the woman beside me. As he moved away I asked him “what about her meals?” He took one out and left it on the tray table for her and explained that because she was sleeping he didn’t leave any. She moved a little but didn’t wake up to eat any of it. Hours passed and another meal time came. A different male hostess came this time and asked what she wanted, tried to move the previous meal to put another one. She looked at what was there previously, returned the main meal and the tray and kept the things she wanted. The hostess seemed amused at what she had done and started to try to explain that she didn’t need to give back the tray. She didn’t say anything she just put the things in her bag.
All the time I sat beside her I wondered about her where was she from where was she going? What happened to her? Why was she muttering to herself? After 6 ½ hours we arrived safely in Dakar. I got up to leave, I took my bag up from the overhead cabin and was walking away when she called to me to take up my sweater that I was forgetting. I exited the plane. As we entered the immigration area I heard an officer direct a group of people that had gotten off the plane to go upstairs if you were getting the connecting flight to Freetown. In the line at JFK a lady behind me said she was headed to Liberia. Was the woman who sat beside me on the plane going to Sierra Leone or Liberia?
At dinner I thought about the woman again. I realized that she had not gotten up at any point during the flight and she didn’t eat or drink anything. Was she from Sierra Leone or Liberia? did she survive the genocide that took place there?