Talk Without Speaking

So, I guess first off I should mention what might be fairly obvious, I haven’t been around recently. I got shipped off to Boston for business recently and I’ll try to blog more about that shortly. The point of this post is to mention a really incredibly encounter I had on my way out there.

At the Vancouver airport, on the way to Boston, I realized that I had forgotten to bring anything to read. I noticed Shake Hands with the Devil in the nearby bookstore so decided to pick that up. I already had a copy of it at home but had only made it partially through so I thought that this would be a great opportunity to finish it. I spent most of the flight from Vancouver-Montreal getting back into it.

While waiting for the plane to board in the transit lounge in Montreal, I see someone who looks remarkably like Romeo Dallaire sit down a few chairs away from me. I look from the book cover and back to him a couple of times and throw it off to my imagination. Once halfway to Boston the stewardess passes by me, sees what I’m reading and says, “Please tell me you’re with him.” So, yes, I got confirmation that it was indeed him and he’s sitting a few seats behind me. I have to say that I found it pretty hard to focus on the book knowing that he was close behind me The stewardess thought this was all very funny and told him that I was reading his book and he, through her, offered to sign it for me.

I didn’t take him up on this but I did go back to him once the plane landed to say hello. I knew that he had just been appointed to the Canadian Senate just a few days earlier so I congratulated him on that and told him that I thought that there seem to be no limits on his ability to serve his country. We then chatted about David and the work that he is doing in Sudan as well as his misadventures in Uganda. As it turns out he is in Boston working on figuring out how to rid the world of child soldiers.

We watch movies, we watch TV, we read comic books, looking for heros. I found my brief encounter with him exceptionally inspirational and I thought about meeting him for days afterwards. Hell, I guess I’m still thinking about it.

A woman who was sitting next to me on the return flight from the States and I got to talking about the book once she saw that I was (still) reading it. She told me that, when asked by a friend to explain the differences between Canadians and Americans, she said that only Canadians would support and idolize someone like Romeo Dallaire who’s mission in Rwanda was plagued with a tragic inability to act whereby Americans might be more likely to celebrate a comparable general who had successfully crushed the enemy.