Coming To America Part 3

IN AUGUST 1967 I HAD EMBARKED ON THE BIGGEST ADVENTURE OF MY YOUNG LIFE - headed from Africa to America. The five fortunate ASPAU scholarship recipients from Zambia were coming from the furtherest south of any scholarship recipients since the nations south of us, Rhodesia and South Africa, did not qualify for the program by virtue of their globally unpopular minority-led governments. We had a full day to enjoy in Nairobi about which I have already written in my posting "Kenya Votes". The Zambian five were joined in Nairobi by scholarship participants from East Africa so the ASPAU group increased considerably in size. Early in the morning we boarded an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 720 (a variant of the 707) for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia where we transferred to another 720 for our flight to Rome. (Ethiopian Airlines was established by Emperor Haile Selassie in 1946 and for many years run by TWA; it is still one of Africa's premier airlines).

The flight to Rome included intermediate stops in Cairo, Egypt and Athens, Greece. In Cairo the airport windows were covered with black material, a remnant of the blackout which has been imposed during the Six-Day War in June between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which redrew the map of the area to what appears in atlases today. After a short stop in Athens we arrived in the late afternoon. By then I was pretty tired but still had one leg to go. Our group next boarded an Air France Caravelle twinjet for Orly Airport in Paris. There I learned one of the hard lessons of airline travel, that while I had made all my connections my Samsonite suitcase, a kind gift from American missionary friends in the Congo, had not. So, all I had to wear were the clothes I had on. African-American Institute representatives met us on arrival and ferried us by bus to a hotel somewhere in the heart of Paris where the rest of our group of over 80 scholarship recipients had already arrived from West Africa. I remained the sole white person in the group.

After what must have been rather a short night and real croissants for breakfast we were all loaded on buses for Le Bourget Airport, where Charles Lindbergh, a Minnesotan, had landed on his historic transatlantic flight in May 1927. On the way we did get a view of the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe. Awaiting us at the airport was a Lockheed Electra four engine turbo-prop aircraft chartered from American Flyers Airlines of Dallas, Texas (see above). (Don't knock it - the Beatles had earlier come to America on American Flyers!) Before boarding we all had to weigh in on a large dial scale along with our luggage. I had no luggage so I stood on the scale alone; being Paris the weight was in kilograms.

Sometime soon after noon we took off on the final leg to America. After a couple of hours or less we landed at Shannon on Ireland's west coast for refueling (we needed full tanks to successfully span the expanse of water ahead of us) and then took off again for the longest leg of the trip. As I recall there were two American stewardesses taking care of over eighty African novice flyers. The call bells went off with regularity and I remember the Kenyan next to me ringing his bell to ask the rather harried stewardess how one feels when they are airsick. Her response, "Believe me, you'll know". The question put me on the alert for any strange activity from his direction! During the flight an information sheet was passed through the cabin informing us that we were flying at 225 miles per hour at 18,000 feet, less than half the speed and half the altitude that modern jets fly across the Atlantic.

After an eternity and just before sunset we landed in Gander, Newfoundland, which in those days was a very busy airport for flights crossing the Atlantic, and more recently was again made famous when many westbound flights were grounded there on September 11, 2001. We refueled and took off again headed for, of all places, Hartford, Connecticut...and there my feet first touched American soil.

Immediately I was introduced to a British/American idiosyncracy. Although I had received a student visa in my Zambian passport I had to renew it every year so that the U.S. Immigration service could ensure that I was still in school. The immigration officer stamped my passport with an entry stamp and wrote 8/5/68 on the "valid until" line. I read that, as I had always read it, to mean May 8th, 1968 which meant that I had to renew the visa in just a few months. Only later did I realize that it was in fact good until August 5th, 1968 since the visa had been issued on August 5th, 1967.

In Hartford we were met by representatives of a program called Experiment in International Living (EIL) of Brattleboro, Vermont where we were to spend the next week at their campus, the School for International Learning, receiving orientation to our life in America. I was also to spend the week wearing the same clothes again and again (washing them each evening) and trying to recover my suitcase from somewhere in Europe before I headed further west for Minnesota in a week. Watch for "Coming To America Part 4".

(c) 2008 roy kruse