Safety Procedures

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According to Xhosa and Zulu legend, a giant carnivorous sail-finned eel called the Inkanyamba controls the powers of the wind and sky. The Inkanyamba needs to be regarded with constant measures of respect and caution, for fear of its tendency towards massive destruction when angry. As children, Xhosa elders ‘were not even allowed to use the word Inkanyamba, for the Inkanyamba might hear its name and come’.1 Through these Inkanyamba-controlled skies, Air Lesotho briefly navigated a tiny fleet.

Air Lesotho took passengers across the Limpopo and the Vaal – to Johannesburg, Gabarone, Maputo and Manzini – before it was forced to suspend all international flights for reasons of safety, and before it was totally disassembled due to financial insolvency. The Limpopo and Vaal are not insignificant rivers, and each runs deep with history. The Vaal served as the boundary between the two breakaway Boer republics seeking to establish themselves free of British colonial rule in the Cape Colony – Transvaal (‘across the Vaal’) and the Orange Free State. The Limpopo was immortalized in the West as “green” and “greasy” by Rudyard Kipling in Just So Stories, and Vasco de Gama anchored here in 1498. The distances are not great, but the nine Air Lesotho planes, in tandem links with Royal Swazi Airlines and Air Mozambique, provided the only way to leave Lesotho, the only landlocked country with a single border, without stepping foot in South Africa.

I didn’t know Air Lesotho had ever existed when I took my seat on a Uganda Airlines Twin Otter prop at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1998. Every seat on the plane was either a window or an aisle, and they were small. I could feel the tightness against my hips and my knees dug into the seat in front. It felt like it had a cardboard back – hard, but somehow malleable.

Twin Otters are bouncy planes, like station wagons with wings. They’re made in Canada and are touted as ‘bush planes’, able to take off and land over very short distances in demanding circumstances. They’re custom-fitted with skis, pontoons, or wheels, and make up the core of the Antarctic research fleet. You can find them over the Himalayas and in the Masai Mara, over the Sahara and in the Andes.

I’ve never enjoyed flying. I’ve always thought it to be the ultimate test of anyone’s faith in capitalism. Airfare wars compromise every element of flight from manufacture to operation. Airlines are routinely scolded for not keeping up to regulation and calculating risk on cost-benefit analysis: how much it would cost the company to ‘get caught’ versus how much it would cost to upgrade entire fleets. Pilots board drunk and sleepless, cargo is loaded to maximum capacity for runway conditions that can change during flight, and the power of nature will always remain dominant to the mechanics of humanity.

But flying in Twin Otters is different. These planes seem built for the sky, unlike their multi-ton globe spanning cousins. They’re closer in size to the Maribu Storks that perch in the trees outside the airport than to a 747. The cockpit doors often remain open, allowing the pilots to yell back updates as there are not hosts or hostesses, and, at least on this flight, no functioning public address system. These pilots know their planes by sound and feel, and rely on their eyes and ears more than electronic auto-navigational GPS systems.

And thank goodness for that.

As I looked around I realized that all of the signage in the plane was in Arabic. The seatbelt signs, door instructions, and various other placards were unreadable. The same could only be true of the cockpit controls. Uganda is, of course, a multilingual country that has two official languages, but neither is Arabic. Puzzled, I reached for the safety instruction card. Across the front it read, in typography reminiscent of a mid-1980s discotheque roller-rink, AIR LESOTHO.

The mystery deepened. I opened the well-creased trifold, and found the requisite rudimentary drawings of flame engulfed airplanes, smoke-filled cabins, and emergency water landings. This plane only had one exit, so it wouldn’t be hard to find, and we’d have to be miles off course to get over any water.

I tried to trace the lineage of the plane in my mind as the door closed and the propellers started. Slowly cranking in circles on one side and then the other, their uneven rhythms building to such a tempo that they unified into a loud and persistent hum. I was in Uganda. I knew that. The aircraft was built in Canada. I knew that. It was not built for Uganda Airlines. Nor was it built for Air Lesotho, a country many miles further removed from any Arabic speaking neighbor. So who was it built for? And when? Each scenario I imagined pushed the airline into an older vintage, with a greater number of clocked hours and second-hand sales. I stopped thinking about it. We passed the president’s private jet, cordoned off with cones and rope. I looked back down at the Air Lesotho safety card. Inside, in small print, it read “ALL FLIGHTS SUBJECT TO GOVERNMENT APPROVAL”.

Twenty minutes later we were rising over the end of the runway, rocking slightly and vibrating at a considerable rate. The landscape below quickly transformed into the picturesque rolling grasslands and stark outcroppings of trees that are so often stereotyped as ‘typical’ African landscape. We were headed southward, towards Rwanda. I wanted to watch the land change into the lush green hills that had long faced speculation as the source of another of Africa’s great rivers, the Nile, but the ground here was parched and dry. I could feel the vibrations in my whole body and thought about old pilots like Beryl Markham who traversed these skies before there were runways, with a box of tools in the back just in case.

The seats around me were empty, and the plane was conspicuously absent of passengers. Flights from Uganda had increased since the Rwandan Patriotic Front, using Uganda as a staging ground, had invaded Rwanda to end the genocide four years earlier, but nobody seemed to be going to Rwanda, at least not by air.

I pressed my head against the window, trying to get the widest vantage possible of the country below. I pulled my head back off the window and rolled back into the chair. Within seconds the window assembly came tumbling off, exposing the raw steel and bolts of the outer shell. Wires dangled precariously between the bulk in my lap and machinery somewhere deep in the plane. Frantically, I tried to reattach the estranged piece, pressing and adjusting it, concerned that this could just be the first piece in a disintegration chain reaction. I hoped that this window wasn’t the critical piece holding it all together. After much struggle I was able to precariously balance the window panel back in place along the side of the plane. Should I alert anyone? I moved to the seat behind me and pretended like it hadn’t happened. There was nothing about the windows falling out in the Air Lesotho safety guide.

1 Wood, Felicity. Inkanyamba, the snake in the sky, accessed 06 March 2015: http://www.hogsback.co.za/magical_hogsback/tornadoes_serpents.aspx

Moda

02 April 2016
Istanbul

The bottom of the Mediterranean is coated thick with bodies. Tens of thousands of tons of cold hard water weighing on the dark and lifeless shapes. The newly dead join them, as they have for years past, and will continue for years to come. But now, in this moment, the bodies come more quickly, and in greater numbers: hundreds at a time, thousands in a month. Sinking slowly, over days, tossed and buoyed by currents.

At home, mothers and fathers will wait for word of a safe passage, until their own deaths end the waiting. Wives will slowly lose the hope in their hearts, and they will despair. Lovers will curse their own eyes for crying themselves dry. Children will look North and West.

And more will set out. Boats filled only with sun-bleached skeletons wash up on far distant shores, half a world away. Who are the luckier ones?

And I sit here, watching the waves lap these rocks, afraid to look at my reflection in the water. Mine will only be met by lifeless eyes, looking back up at me.

Batumi

I found a beautiful but antiquated and poor quality grand piano from St Petersburg in the lobby of the Aura Boutique Hotel. The keys stuck slightly and a broken string along the soundboard inside gave some of the wildly out-of-tune notes a sitar-like buzz.

I sat down and explored it, finding the lower register slightly more coherent in key, and started playing a slow but not incoherent melody of chords based around an A minor and a G. It echoed against the marble floor and concrete walls and up the long stairwell.

An old woman in a long white dress, with brash and sloppy make-up and unruly white hair walked up and stood to my left, momentarily watching me play. Aware of her eyes, I slowly stopped and turned to her. I anticipated her comments. She said something in Georgian. It was unintelligible to me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, lightly patting my own chest to demonstrate I was regretful, “english only”. Without pause, the woman, using words that somehow sounded like she looked, said, “what are you playing” in perfect accented english. The question was delivered like a statement, sinking at the end so as to give it a lightly disgusted quality and leaving an ambiguity in the air around the intent of her intervention.

“Oh,” I replied, “nothing. I’m just making it up. I’m playing whatever is coming out of my head.”

The woman stood for a moment, and I imagined her tracing the great Russian and Soviet classical composers in her memory, remnants of cigarette smoke and contempt lingering in her dress.

“Ah,” she croaked, pausing mid-grimace. “It is not interesting then.”

No longer deserving of her attention, she turned and walked away before I could respond.

Andaman Sea

Originally published on 22 August 2022 by the Mixed Migration Center | By Hanh Nguyen, Themba Lewis

On 24 May 2022, at least 17 Rohingya refugees were killed after their boat capsized in bad weather off the Myanmar coast. Children drowned. The victims were among some 90 Rohingya on board who were attempting to leave Sittwe – the capital of Rakhine state in Myanmar – for Malaysia. The number of journeys had fallen significantly early in the COVID-19 pandemic but have resumed in recent months, and these deaths are a tragic justification of increasing concerns for those taking the sea journey to Malaysia.

Observers fear that countries including Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia, are taking harsher measures to cope with the “irregular” movements of people. Hundreds of Rohingya have been intercepted in Myanmar and Bangladesh while many others have been arrested elsewhere en route to Malaysia. These events, despite happening on a smaller scale, mirror the movements and responses around the Andaman Sea crisis of 2015 as authorities continue criminalizing refugees and the seeking of protection from persecution.

Mixed movements resumed from Bangladesh and Myanmar to Malaysia

According to UNODC, more than 900 Rohingya have attempted to reach Malaysia since December, exceeding the number from the same period last year (633, according to UNHCR). Smugglers in Bangladesh and Myanmar usually facilitate the journeys, which can include both land border crossings and maritime movements. Refugees are exposed to fatal risks during those journeys, especially women and children. According to a source quoted by Radio Free Asia, “about 35 out of 100 people make it”. The rest are either arrested or lose their lives. From December 2021 to date, more than 600 Rohingya have been arrested on the journey to Malaysia, and according to UNODC at least 65 reported dead or missing.

Unlike maritime movements during 2020-2021, which were made up of Rohingya only, recent boats from Bangladesh and Myanmar to Malaysia consist of Rohingya, other Myanmar nationals, and Bangladeshis. A boat captured by the Malaysian authorities in Kuala Kurau on 1 May 2022, for example, held 143 people, including 134 Rohingya, four Bangladeshi nationals, and five Myanmar nationals. This kind of mixed movement, despite being on a much smaller scale, also mirrors the movements in the Andaman Sea seven years ago, when as many as 8,000 Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi migrants were left stranded at sea after being refused disembarkation by Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand.

Anti-refugee rhetoric continues to offset regional protection frameworks

Compared with seven years ago, regional frameworks to protect refugees and migrants have improved. The Bali Process on People Smuggling, Trafficking in Persons and Related Transnational Crime provides a platform for collaboration on the establishment of disembarkation options and cooperation in search and rescue efforts. ASEAN has also provided various frameworks to strengthen protection for migrant workers and victims of human trafficking, especially women and children.

However, the regional frameworks have yet been able to energize member states to protect the rights of people on the move, and changes in national immigration policy have been limited. Australia reaffirmed the continuation of its “turning back boats” policy despite the electoral victory of the Labour Party in May 2022. Thailand continues its view of refugees as “illegal” migrants, while every country on the route remains a non-signatory to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, shying away from any responsibilities toward refugees.

Furthermore, anti-refugee and anti-immigrant rhetoric have been on the rise. In Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Myanmar, reports on Rohingya refugees being arrested and detained have proliferated, using dehumanizing and inaccurate language – such as “illegal migrants”, “criminal tendencies”, and “nabbing”. These reports have stoked public opposition to migrants and refugees. At the same time, countries like Malaysia and Thailand have increased immigration raids, resulting in the arrest and deportation of refugees, including those with UNHCR-issued refugee cards: an act in violation of international law.

What lessons from the Andaman Sea crisis are still applied to today’s responses?

The Andaman Sea crisis in 2015 demonstrates the complexity of mixed movements as well as the responses required. Boats traveling to Malaysia are carrying people who have different legal statuses and who are departing for a variety of reasons. Regardless of these differences, people in mixed movements are exposed to the same protection risks and violations on the journey. These risks are only heightened in the absence of a comprehensive legal protection framework in transit and destination countries.

These movements of Rohingya refugees also prove that without proper attention to conditions for Rohingya in Myanmar and Bangladesh, movement is inevitable, as they seek to avoid humanitarian and migration crises. In Myanmar, ten years after the launch of the ethnic cleansing campaign targeting the Rohingya population, the condition of people held in the Rohingya displacement camp in Sittwe remains critical, with debt, lack of employment, and a generation of education-less children damaging Rohingya communities. In Bangladesh, movements in Cox’s Bazar have been increasingly restricted. Since May 2022, the local police have introduced a new “camp-to-camp movement pass”, which is required for Rohingya to visit other camps. Those who travel without the pass are reportedly detained and beaten. Additionally, three months after shutting down thousands of shops owned by refugees, in April 2022 Bangladesh authorities detained more than 300 Rohingya for working outside their refugee camps. Given the dim prospects of repatriation and resettlement, and worsening conditions in Bangladesh, moving onwards is the only option for many.

How can the region respond better this time?

In a statement on 23 May, UNHCR warned that “collective failure to act will continue to lead to tragic and fatal consequences” for those at sea, citing the deaths of the 17 Rohingya. The warning is ominous, pointing directly at predictable and amendable failures in protection response, while adding that Rohingya refugees will continue to embark on dangerous journeys in search of safety and stability, and in increasing numbers. Although the overall number of Rohingya attempting to reach Malaysia from Myanmar and Bangladesh over the past few months remains significantly lower than in May 2015, the situation is volatile and can change quickly at any time.

Given the drivers of onward movement, increasing border controls and criminalizing refugees will increase the risks of the journey, more than it will stop people from moving. Countries on the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea must cooperate to conduct search and rescue operations to save lives. Refugees who flee persecution and catastrophic conditions in Myanmar and Bangladesh should be allowed to disembark and provided with adequate assistance. States in the region should urgently agree on collective solutions to address the issue and better share responsibility for hosting refugees.

The Green Bean

In 1982 I was a diplomat’s kid in Kathmandu, Nepal. I lived in Kalimati, opposite Lincoln School and down from the Rana Palace that now housed the Nepal office of USAID, hundreds of murmuring pigeons, and the occasional predatory owl (and requisite rodent prey). I lived in Takura House, an awkwardly architectured concrete and brick block, painted yellow, with a flat roof perfect for kite-flying and housing our rabbits, Lopsy, the tough one, and Funnybunny, docile and lacking in personality, but easier to catch and pet.

Kite-flying was a dangerous thrill. We heard often of other kids like us, broken or killed when they fell from rooftops in the heat of kite battling. We coated our string with tapioca paste and powered glass and cut any other kites we could from the sky, watching them float and spin downward when we won, and reeling in hundreds of meters of kite string across rice paddies and neighborhood rooftops when we didn’t. The battles themselves could mean running and pulling at the kite string, forcing it upward or outward, dodging an adversary working to encircle the line. Inevitably a troop of the younger kids would strike off to recover any fallen kites, tearing through the rice paddies and overgrown fields barefoot or nearly so. A cut kite, after all, was fair game to whomever might recover it, and a good fighter, even if cut, would happily be used again with some alterations and repairs.

The monkeys came often, sitting along our back yard wall and scavenging leftover rice or other offerings at the Puja place at the base of the sturdy tree at one corner of the yard. The wall had been diverted around the trunk to ensure the tree remained publicly accessible, and the brass bell rang regularly, and incense burned, throughout the day as walking commuters passed.

But this is meant to be the story of Green Bean. A story I have tried to write before, but which has never come out quite right. Perhaps it’s the nature of the story itself, or the time, or the telling. How does someone recreate such a specific place and time as Nepal, in the early eighties, as a seven-year-old boy? Perhaps that is best left to the imagination of the reader, suffice it to say it was magical world of giant serpents and two-faced gods, living goddesses and animal sacrifices; thick warm sticky blood on the sidewalks and walls. I had seen a lady in her fine sari slip on goat’s blood at a temple in the rain once and fall, almost comically, into a pool of blood so thick she had trouble coming to her feet again, and when she did, she was covered with the dark slime. I remember the sound of the kukhuri blades slicing living necks. It was a clean and visceral sound. A swishing noise that you could feel in your body. I remember the eyes of the decapitated sitting open in heads placed aside while bodies convulsed and twitched on the pavement, blood collected in bowls. Rice and tikapowder at the ready for mixing and wearing.

The memories are too numerous, the tangents too many, for a descriptive telling of the Green Bean tale, so I’ll just begin where I should: Green Bean was a small, solid green, Himalayan parrot. I do not know the origins of Green Bean, nor do I know his fate, but I know that I was part of a great transition in his life, and he in mine. In fact, I don’t even know if he was, indeed, ‘him’. I like to hope that his days after those that intersected with mine were the best in his short life – although I hope, in terms of parrot life spans, that he did quite well.

Green Bean had not been hatched in captivity, of that I am reasonably sure. But where he had been born, I do not know. I think now about the Terai, the hot, dry, tiger and elephant infested lowlands along the Indian border. I had heard Green Bean had been captured there and loaded on a truck, likely Tata, for the grueling, and no-doubt overloaded, journey along the winding seasick road up the mountains and back down again into the markets of the Kathmandu valley – the valley that had, before the folkloric legends with their mighty blades sliced a pass in the sheer mountains themselves, allowing the waters and serpents to flow into oblivion like a great drain, been a vast inland sea.

I imagine Green Been in a bamboo box, maybe even an up-turned doko, in the noisy city, poked at by children and eyed by prowling and hungry cats. My imagination fails at this point, but I can tell you what I do know: Green Bean ended up under the care of Cass Estes, 4th grader and tomboy, who could not, for whatever reason, continue to care for him, and thus he came to Takura House in Kalimati.

Green Bean was given free access to our second-floor screened porch, which jutted off the corner of my parent’s bedroom, screened on two sides, from floor to ceiling. The porch made quite the aviary, lined by a railing upon which Green Bean could sit and look out, and large enough to fly across with considerable airtime. Green Bean sat through readings of The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe and all of the Roald Dahl favorites. He called and chirped at us when we played in the yard below, flying to and from his favorite spots, darting, at times, from one end of the aviary to the other. He became comfortable on that porch, and watched with neither apprehension nor fear when we would emerge into his domain, monopolizing the chair and table for our reading sessions, drinking fresh lemon soda as the sun slowly set. I had never seen another parrot like Green Bean in Nepal, and in the absence of kin, he became comfortable with us, eyeing the squawking and disheveled crows noisily perched in the trees that lined the yard, and the kites – of the predatory bird variety – circling at great height overhead, searching for rodents and smaller birds (like Green Bean) that might make easy prey if set-upon by surprise, at high speed, from above.

Green Bean came to recognize us, and would become visibly excited when I climbed up over the perimeter wall and thumped to the ground in our yard, home from school. A series of bubbling whistles and chirps would start as I picked myself up and walked towards the back door, past our garden and the Puja place. I’d drop my backpack at the door and climb the wide staircase over the laundry area up to the second floor, down the hall, through the bedroom, and out onto the porch. Green Bean would chirp and tilt his head. And it continued like this for many days, until one day, which, on the outset, seemed just like any other.

On that day I came home as normal, pulling myself up the brick wall until I could get one leg over, swinging my body around, careful to avoid the broken glass sunk into the top of the wall as a (clearly ineffective) deterrent for those tempted to scale it, and dropping into our yard. I walked, as was routine, to the backdoor and up the stairs. I had no reason to suspect anything different from Green Bean, so I could not have fathomed what I was about to find.

I crossed the bedroom to the far corner and slowly opened the door to the screen porch, careful, as I had become, to be aware of Green Bean in the case that he was just behind the door, in danger of being knocked by it. But Green Bean was not behind the door. Instead I saw him at the far corner of the porch, pacing the ground anxiously, distracted, agitated, barely cognizant of my presence.

Then I saw them.

Green Bean cranked his head toward me and chirped, then turned back again, peering out through the thin screen, to the world beyond. I heard another chirp, and another, and another, swelling into a cacophony of sound. Little green parrots lined the narrow outer ledge of the porch in their multitudes, one against the other, jostling for balance and position, tilting their heads watching me. Their calls were echoed by yet even more, in the trees that lined our property. As I stepped onto the porch I saw, to my astonishment, green parrots in the hundreds, swarming the branches and limbs, chattering and popping, playing and singing in the treetops. The crows had gone, and the parrots had come.

Green Bean, I said, looking at him, pressed as he was against the screen, beak to beak with an identical looking wild mirror image of himself on the outside. He looked back as I walked over, watching me move towards him. Green Bean, I said again, bending down and picking him up carefully in my hands, feeling his warmth and delicate body through his feathers. I brought his face to mine. You want to go? I believe my mother was now beside me.

Without thinking we were through the door with Green Bean in hand, and down the hall. Up again, two short flights, to the rooftop door. I pushed it hard with my shoulder and it swung open with force. Lopsy and Funnybunny took little notice. The parrots were here too. They crossed the sky and alighted, briefly, on the roof as I walked to the edge over the screened porch, adjacent to our solar water heaters. I stood for a moment with Green Bean, and we both looked out at the trees. This was the best thing I had ever done for him, I thought to myself, and the best thing I could do for him. One of the best things I’d ever done, period. I opened my hands.

Green Bean crossed the yard he had so long watched us play in, before landing in a tree branch. Before long I couldn’t tell him from the rest, and within an hour all the parrots had gone, and they never returned. Wherever they went, Green Bean had also gone.

They had taken him.