I took an early morning bus trip from Newry to Dublin airport and checked my case in for the journey to Burundi. Checking my case involved an examination of my passport and a prolonged discussion about my visa. As everything is online these days, the Burundian Government has moved the business of getting visas from the nearest embassy to cyberspace. Did I have permission to enter Burundi? Theoretically yes. Once that was clear I went through the first of a seemingly endless chain of security checks and I was off, first to Frankfurt. Transfer from one flight to the next requires another trip through security and boarding requires another passport check. From Frankfurt I travelled through the night to arrive at Addis Ababa. It was a beautiful African dawn as we got off the plane and took yet another trip through security, and another passport check as I boarded the last flight to Bujumbura.
As we got off the plane at Bujumbura we went through a medical check, our hands sprayed with disinfectant and our temperatures checked. Then came the tricky business of getting my visa application verified, which for some unknown reason seemed to get stuck and resulted in my passport being passed around as if it was the prize in a game of pass the parcel. When I finally got that bit sorted out, there was yet another passport check with my fingerprints and photograph taken. Given the amount of travelling I have done in the past few years, my fingerprints and photograph must be in more government records than the average international drug baron. Then there was yet another scan of my luggage before I finally got out the airport door.
My journey required multiple security and passport checks and one, albeit very basic, medical check. From memory the trip back will require even more trips through security, more passport checks. All those security and passport checks make me think of how difficult is becoming to reach across cultural and political frontiers to build the bonds of friendship and trust which we need for basic human interaction and, more importantly to us, Christian mission.
“I suppose, that at first,
it was people who invented borders,
and then borders
started to invent people”
wrote the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in “Fuku”, as a protest against the barriers to human friendship back in the 1980s.
Being a Christian is about crossing borders and boundaries. To borrow again from Yevtushenko “Thank God we have invisible threads and threadlets born from the threads of blood from the nails in the palms of Christ...tearing apart the barbed wire and leading love to join love...” Early Christian missionaries crossed boundaries from west Asia into Europe and as far afield as Africa and India. Being able to reach across the boundaries invented by people and a building sense of all being “one in Christ” is a vital part of Christian mission.
(Fuku was published in English in 1987 in “Almost at the End” translated by Antonina W. Bouis, Albert C. Todd and Yevgeny Yevtushenko in New York by H. Holt)
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