3/12/06 In Flight Over Africa

3/12/06

I’ve lost track of time – all I know it’s early in themorning here, because in a 2.5 hours we’ll be landing in Nairobi and the local time there will be 7:30AM. The airline provides a small video screen next to each seat which keeps flashing pertinent information, such as expected time of arrival, ground speed, altitude,outside temperature. Also they flash a map of the continents – with a graphic representation of our airplane flying to its destination.

We started in London, south through Europe and sometime around midnight, we arrived at the edge of the African continent. Egypt and the pyramids (if we could see them) - right outside the window!

The small little clip-art airplane moves along the screen from London to Nairobi. Just about a half an hour ago it showed that we flew over Darfur. I couldn’t help but feel the symbolism in this fly-by. The passengers on the plane are asleep. The lights are dim. Every here and there you notice the glare of a video monitor, for those of us whose body-clock is out of whack. Genocide is taking place six miles below our plane! How far is that? Glendale to Burbank? Mothers are being raped, fathers are being killed, and a new generation of orphans are being formed. And the plane cruises on – probably on auto pilot – as the passengers may or may not notice the small dot on thescreen that says “Darfur.”

There’s a eerie parallel to our Armenian Genocide.When you read the articles and accounts of 1915, it was SO evident that a systematic extermination was taking place, and like the passengers on this large Boeing 767, the entire world flew over Armenia, most of them asleep and certainly, most of them unable to understand the scope and magnitude of Genocide – not only for the people dying in Armenia, but for the scars that would haunt generations to come.

© Fr. Vazken Movsesian 2006