Are you in a hurry?

“Are you in a hurry?” the man in the smart suit in the seat next to me asked?

“Well, I do have a connection to catch” I replied, trying to look eager to be let out of my seat, as the other passengers on the small Flybe flight between Manchester and Paris filed steadily past us.

“uh, ok” smart suited business man grunted and began to collect together his belongings.

I sat in my seat frustrated. Not just because I was unable to get out, but because even when we disembarked the plane we would only get as far as a bus to take us to the terminal nestled somewhere in the far distance.

I hastened down the steps of the plane and onto the transfer bus. A small crowd had assembled on the windy tarmac outside the front and rear doors of the bus. It was a tight squeeze and it wasn’t clear how all of the people that just got off the plane were going to get on. Then I noticed that those who were outside were engaged in animated discussions with French Airport Officials (made official, of course,  by the fact that they were the ones with the high-vis jackets on), clearly suggesting that a second bus was necessary.

After a further ten minutes of frustrating inactivity one of the rebellious minority stepped onto the bus and announced that the officials had told him that there was no second bus and we wouldn’t be going anywhere until everyone got on this one.

A busy matatu

Accustomed as I am to African matatu’s, which don’t just take an excessive number of passengers, but their luggage, their children and their chickens, I squeezed myself into the most uncomfortable position I could muster, with a handbag digging in my back and an arm reaching up to the nearest grab rail centimetres from my head.

We didn’t so much disembark as fall into the terminal building when the bus doors opened. It was a relief to breathe again.

I consulted the connections board to see where my, now impending, flight to Nairobi went from, to discover that it only required a short walk. Unfortunately it then required another bus trip! I had thirty five minutes before the flight left and was starting to worry.

Thirty minutes later, as I sat in my seat on the Boeing 767 to Nairobi, slightly redder and a lot more out of puff then when I had begun my journey, I reflected on Mr not-to-worried-about-getting-off-the-plane-business-executives comment to me.

“Are you in a hurry?”

I guess I spend much of my life in a hurry, keen to get a day at work done, keen to reach the weekend, keen to go to a dinner, a concert or an event, keen to get to the next thing that makes me feel better, the thing that makes working life feel like it is worthwhile.

But I am also learning that sometimes I need to have patience, because there is a bigger story being told. In the book of my life I am rushing to get to the end of the chapter rather than appreciating how it builds into a whole (I so nearly wrote “hole” then – that would be a more tragic book entirely!)

In Kenya too, I am eager to see the next big thing, to celebrate milestones, to write about success stories. But the work of the Isaiah Trust there is still building. The story hasn’t finished yet.

I am about to begin another chapter, I am eager to meet up with Moses and Tatu, to meet Paul James and his new wife, Nancy, and most especially to hear about the children we support and care for. Their school year is coming to an end, they will be starting to come home for the holidays and I am looking forward to all that they have to say.

The sun will burn me, the roads will frustrate me, the timekeeping of my wonderful African colleagues will challenge me.

But the stories and the faces and the chapters we are writing together will bless me.

I am in a hurry, but so much that I can’t savour the words over the next week or so.