Life in the Submarine - The Mill Hill Missionaries

‘adventure’. At the end of the Chapter I was elected a member of the GeneralCouncil and, as they say, ‘that was that’.I did feel honoured by the trust given to me, but was also deeply pained at therealisation that I would not be able to return to Congo, at least not to stay. AndI felt totally out of place at St Joseph’s after more than twenty years of absence.It took more than a year to get re-acclimatised and to feel reasonably at easein the task entrusted to me: Councillor for Africa. My first trip in that capacitywas to Cameroon at the invitation of George Hanser, a fellow Chapter delegate,who was Superior there. What I saw in Cameroon on that first visit filled mewith deep emotion. There I saw long stretches of tarmac road, taxi buses,decent bridges and other forms of development. Why, I wondered, was thispossible here, and still a distant dream in the Equatorial rainforest of Congo?Frequent visits to a variety of African countries in the following years helped meto get some perspective on political and economic realities in Africa.I did of course go back to Congo to say goodbye, soon after I had been electedon to the General Council. And I visited the gradually shrinking contingent ofMill Hill missionaries in the diocese several more times during the course of mytwelve years tenure as Councillor for Africa from 1988 to 2000. On one ofthese trips I came together with Maurice McGill, our Superior General. It wason this occasion that I had the most frightening experience of air travel I haveever had. Here’s what happened. After the completion of our visit on our wayback to Kinshasa, before reaching the provincial capital Mbandaka for astopover, we hit a giant tropical thunderstorm. The pilot saw no way ofcircumventing it and decided to fly right through it. At first we felt no more thanthe usual turbulence on such occasions, but then the plane started to violentlysurge and fall, lurching left and right, and shaking uncontrollably all the while.There seemed to be lightening all around us. If it were not for our seatbelts wewould have hit our heads against the ceiling several times. People startedscreaming, someone threw up. I thought we were goners – and so did Maurice,he told me afterwards. The ordeal must have lasted for about ten minutes.Then the elements calmed down and we found that we were still alive andflying. It was somewhat disconcerting to see the pilot walk down the aisle a fewminutes later visibly shaken and telling us all that he too had thought we weregoing down!That was my last flight in a Fokker Friendship, the trusted workhorse of theAfrican skies. They would soon be taken out of service in Congo. Things gotworse after that!