May 7: Stolen Wallets, Missed Flights and Happy Coincidences

What, in fact, is the difference between chance and destiny? A friend tells about persuading one of his Navy buddies to attend a social gathering at International Christian University in Tokyo when they were stationed there: my friend wanted to talk to an old teacher who was on sabbatical at the institution. His friend agreed, somewhat reluctantly, but met the woman of his life there, an American foreign student who attended, somewhat reluctantly, at the persuasion of one of her friends. My friend says it was a happy chance, but his friend says it was destiny.

However you define it, chance played a big role in the success of my trip to Burundi. Armed with good advice from Bonaventure and several other friends who knew the African Great Lakes Region well, I made plans to go to Africa in the fall of 2001. My daughter was studying early music at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague then, and the idea was that I could fly from Montreal to Amsterdam, stop over a few days with Elin and then go on to Nairobi, catching a connecting flight to Bujumbura. There was a moment when I considered not going at all—September 11 was just two weeks before I left—but the fact that I’d put up a lot of money for tickets and vaccines and visas was an argument for persevering. So was the thought that things might get worse, and that this window of time was the last I might get. Luckily, that hasn’t proved to be true, but it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I left Montreal.

The Dutch leg of the trip was terrific. Elin showed me around, introduced me to her friends, and I wandered the incredibly civilized city with great pleasure. Until, that is, my wallet was stolen from my purse, probably in the train station in The Hague.

There followed a few moments of panic and comedy. I couldn’t remember the last name of Elin’s roommate or of her boyfriend. I didn’t have her phone number with me, I stumbled into the conservatory to ask help from the secretary who went to great lengths to find her number. He also provided me with the telephone numbers for Master Card and Visa, since my wallet also held my credit cards.

The result was that I had to wait a few days longer in Holland to get replacement cards. That meant that I had to take a different flight to Bujumbura than I’d planned, which is when my unfortunate incident took a dramatic change for the better. My seat mate on the flight I finally took was a Burundais who had taken pilot training at the Canadian forces base at St. Hubert across the river from Montreal in the 1970s and whose daughter worked for an NGO based in a Montreal suburb. They took me under their wings and showed me things I wouldn’t have seen in Bujumbura otherwise.

Chance, or destiny? Whatever if contributed greatly to The Violets of Usambara.

Photo: The peaceful canals of The Hague