I never slept well when I was out doing the seminars. Partly it might have been the fact that I really enjoy teaching, and this was a very intense teaching experience, as well as being a very intense seminar for the students, and I was generally running on adrenaline for the entire week. But, I suspect that I also didn't sleep well, away from Gloria.
In any case, when I was out doing the seminars, I would often sleep only two hours per night. There were many nights that I did not sleep at all between teaching days. I do remember one seminar where I got a grand total of two hours sleep during the entire course of the week. It wasn't quite that bad in Nigeria, but I did not sleep well. And I didn't sleep at all on Thursday night.
That wouldn't have been a particular problem except for what happened on Friday. James always had the radio blaring when he drove me to and from the office. On the way to the office that Friday morning, on one of the news reports, I heard mention of a fire at the international airport. When I got to the office, I asked one of the candidates, who I knew was an employee of the host company, to check out this issue, and see if it would have any effect on my flight that evening. At lunch time she told me that they had checked and that there was absolutely no problem. I don't know whether they were lying to me or somebody else was lying to them.
At the end of the Friday, the last day of the seminar, the candidate from the seminar who had been acting as host, during the week, accompanied me, as James drove me to the airport. My flight was to be fairly late in the evening, so we did not have to rush, as far as we were concerned. This is good, because traffic in Nigeria is truly a wonder. During the course of the two seminars that I taught in Nigeria, I noted that every single car had dents and scratches on the body work of the vehicle. Cars that were used commercially, very often had massive lateral scrapes attesting to numerous collisions and crunches in heavy traffic. Lane markings on Nigerian roads are, at best, suggestions, and, for the most part, have been rubbed into invisibility by the fact that nobody pays attention to them. The entire time that I spent in Nigeria, I saw a grand total of three cars that did not have massive damage to the body work: two of these were on lottery displays in the airport, and one of them I actually can't fully attest to, because although I saw it under careful guard under an awning and obviously it was a big status symbol for whoever owned it, I only did see one side of it. Traffic in Nigeria can get very busy, and very clogged, and you wonder how any movement is made at all.
However, we did make it to the airport. Which was completely dark. There was not a single light showing in the entire place. We went inside anyway. Eventually the host found out that yes, the international airport was shut down: no, no flights were departing from the international airport that night; yes, some plates would parting that evening, but we were being held handled through the municipal airport.
In Lagos, the municipal airport is adjacent to the international airport. However the runways and taxiways of the municipal airport cannot handle the weight of jumbo jets that are used on the international flights. Eventually we were to find that a system had been decided where passengers would be checked in, via the facilities at the municipal airport, then held in a room at the municipal airport, until we could be bused down the contiguous taxiways and runways to the international airport, where we finally were able to board our flight..
I did, later, find out what had happened at the international airport. There had been a fire. A fire had started in the electrical panel because they turned the electricity on. The they had to turn the electricity on, because the electricity had been shut off by the power company. The power company had shut off power to the international airport, because the international airport had not paid its power bill in six months.
We eventually got to the municipal airport. Obviously, an awful lot of other people had gotten to the municipal airport as well. We joined a crowd numbering possibly a few thousand, all standing around in a parking lot at the municipal airport. The host, I am very thankful, stayed with me. At one point, he left to see if he could find anything to eat or drink. He came back sometime later with a bottle of some orange looking liquid, and a bit of an apology: this was something that he had been able to find for himself, he said, but likely it wouldn't have been safe for me to drink.
After a couple of hours of this, and an occasional mass movement by the mob when rumors suggested that we should move to one building or another in order to start the boarding process, it was determined that, yes, two flights would be going out that night, and mine would be one of them. By this time, it was also obvious that I was going to miss my connecting flight in London. When we had determined that, yes, my flight would be leaving, and yes, we identified the building that I was to go to in order to start the boarding process, the host provided me with a call on his cell phone, I called the travel office, which, because of the time difference, was still open on Friday afternoon in Florida. I outlined the situation, asked that my connecting flight in London be rebooked, and asked the travel agent to call and let Gloria know. My flight didn't leave until four in the morning, but it did eventually leave.
I don't sleep well on airplanes, either. This is kind of strange: I sleep just fine on trains, and on boats. But not on airplanes. So, despite the fact that I had had no sleep Thursday night, I didn't sleep at all on the flight from Lagos to London, and I didn't sleep at all on the flight from London to Vancouver. I had been doing the seminars for a while, by this point, so Gloria and I had worked out a fairly consistent system. Gloria would come to the arrivals area, and usually be in the car, waiting at curbside, so that she didn't have to park. I'd come out of the arrivals area, walk up and down areas where cars could wait for a bit, and find her. When I got to Vancouver, I followed this practice. I came out of the international arrivals area, and walked up and down the areas where I knew that Gloria would have been able to wait in the car. I couldn't find her anywhere. I waited and watched as the cars drove around, long enough for Gloria to have made a circuit, if she hadn't been able to find a place to park on the first time around. No Gloria. I went back into the airport, found a payphone, and phoned home. Gloria answered the phone, and, as soon as I said hello, burst into tears. Apparently, the airline would not tell her what flight I was on, or even what country I was in. I said I'd take a cab home.
By the time I got home that night, I had been up for fifty-seven hours straight.
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