Bongani

The baggage claim belt whirled around on another rotation with a solitary yellow hard-shell suitcase taunting the two girls who stood by and watched it pass them for the third time.

"This isn't happening, right? This can't be happening. This has to be a joke," said Lauren, finally breaking the hypnotic spell of the empty conveyor belt.

"Fuck," was all her friend Allison could manage to respond.

Lauren dug the heels of her hands deep into her eye sockets, blinking down hard to hold back tears. Her mind raced in an oxymoronic attempt to slow down her increasingly panicked breathing. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry. Think, think, think. As if repeating everything three times somehow made it a magic spell. Repeat these words three times to make your suitcase reappear! Repeat three times and regain the three days you’ve already missed of your vacation!

You can do hard things. In every moment, peace is a choice. She chanted phrases and cliché mantras in her head, but it didn’t do anything to alleviate the twisting mass of nerves and bad airport snacks that were roiling in her stomach.

Allison made a move towards the FlySafair baggage counter and Lauren followed her white sneakers wordlessly. 

They looked ridiculous. They looked like cartoon versions of American tourists. Allison was wearing a Grand Canyon sweatshirt which was one step away from a sweatshirt that declared “Freedom!” with a bald eagle soaring across the chest.

Lauren’s sweatpants were from American Eagle and so oversized and baggy that she wouldn’t have been caught dead in them by a man she was dating until at least 8 months in.

We are talking about clothes fit for sitting on the couch, in your house, with a pint of ice cream, after a breakup. Not ideal for making foreign airport employees take you seriously.

“We were contacted by the Johannesburg airport this morning and ensured that our luggage would be arriving here in Cape Town on the 11 AM FlySafair flight. Do you think you could help us?” Allison asked the woman at the counter.

It wasn’t the rudest that Lauren had heard her friend speak to someone at one of the four airports they’d been trudging through, but it wasn’t exactly polite. It was entitled. A tone that the woman at the counter was all too accustomed to. These two girls felt they were owed answers. They expected things to go right for them and when they didn’t, it somehow became everyone else’s problem.

“You can check the bags there,” the FlySafair woman said with a lazy flick of her hand outside the kiosk window where scattered pieces of luggage sat dejectedly. “Otherwise, we don’t have it.” 

Lauren looked on as Allison and the woman stared at each other for a few brief moments. The woman’s face clearly read this conversation is over because Allison broke eye contact first and turned her attention to the island of misfit luggage strewn outside the counter.  

Lauren didn’t move. From where she was standing, it was abundantly clear that their two massive suitcases were not among the shrink wrapped, broken, and misshapen items that Allison was now meticulously examining.

“They’re not there!” Lauren wanted to scream.

But she knew it was giving Allison something to do, and so far, finding something to do is what had kept them both from breaking down into tears or tantrums.

“Excuse me?” Lauren said in the general direction of the counter. 

She wasn’t met with a verbal response, but a look. You know the look. Eyes widening, chin jutting forward. A look that says, “spit it out, I don’t have all day.” The look cut across any language barrier and Lauren obliged.

“If our luggage isn’t here, what do you recommend we do next?” 

“What airline did you fly?” 

“South African Air. But they said that the bags would be coming on-“

“Go talk to them. I can’t help you,” she cut in.

“Allison, I’m going to go over to the South African Air counter, I don’t see our bags here,” Lauren said as calmly as she could. They aren’t there! Stop looking! she screamed internally.

Bongani cradled the landline phone between his cheek and his shoulder while frantically scribbling down baggage claim numbers with his left hand and shuffling through paperwork with his right.

He looked desperately towards the counter window, where two new faces had joined the queue. Bongani tried to make eye contact that conveyed “I’ll be right with you!” but he worried that it more than likely screamed, “get me out of here!”

Bongani shouldn’t have worried. Neither girl caught his eyes because they were too busy craning their necks to look deep into the room where floor to ceiling shelves held peoples misplaced, unwanted and lost luggage. Allison stood on her tippy toes, moved left to right and willed her hard-shell purple bag with an orange bandana tied around the handle to be on one of those shelves. 

Lauren did a quick onceover and let out a shaky breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Her bulging blue Swissgear bag was certainly not in there.

The South African Air employee approached the customer in front of them and exchanged a few words in a language they couldn’t understand. The customer walked off and both girls took a quick step closer to the counter, eager to see if finally, someone would be able to help them.

“How can I help you?” Bongani asked as both the cell phone in his hand and the landline in the office rang loudly.

Lauren looked pointedly at the cell phone but Bongani quickly stuffed it in his khaki pants pocket.

“If you wait for the phone to stop ringing, you’ll be waiting all day” Bongani replied jovially.

There was a brief pause while Lauren and Allison had an unspoken conversation. Allison had struck out at the FlySafair counter. Lauren was up.

“We’re hoping you can help us find our bags. We’ve been traveling in these same clothes for 3 days now and we know our luggage got stuck in Johannesburg last night…but we had been told it would be arriving here on the plane that landed at 11.”

“The flight that landed at 11 was a FlySafair flight. You checked with them?” Bongani asked.

“Yes, and they told us to come over here. We’ve been talking to people for hours and no one seems to be able to figure out where our bags are. We flew Delta to Johannesburg, and they told us they couldn’t help us. We flew South African Air to Cape Town and when we landed, no one was at the airport to help us. And then the Johannesburg airport told us that FlySafair would have our luggage on a plane this morning and now FlySafair can’t help us,” Lauren tried her best to state these things as facts, but the emotions of the past 72 hours couldn’t help but creep in. 

Bongani let out an “Ohhhhkay,” which Lauren interpreted as “well fuck, this sounds like a lot of work.”

“You’re the ones that lost our bag between Johannesburg and Cape Town!” Allison interjected. “There has to be something you can do!”

Lauren cringed, not wanting Allison to flip the switch on Karen-mode quite so soon. She was getting a good vibe from this guy. They’d only been standing there for a minute, and they’d already gotten more of their story conveyed to him than to anyone else. 

“Sorry,” Lauren said, trying to regain the lead on the conversation. “We’ve had a really rough time getting here already and we’re just nervous our bags won’t make it before we leave Cape Town in two days. Do you think there’s anything you can do?”

“You have a claim number?” Bongani asked.

“NO ONE WAS HERE WHEN WE LANDED LAST NIGHT!” Allison screeched back while Lauren looked on in horror.

“What she means is we were the last flight to arrive last night. Everything was closed when we got here and realized our bags hadn’t made it. We could only talk to the baggage handlers and to be honest they didn’t really help. So now we don’t have a claim filed…which is what everyone keeps asking us for,” Lauren jumped in and attempted to do damage control. “Here – I have our boarding passes and the bag tags if that would help at all?”

 She offered up the crinkled pieces of paper that had been passed from backpack, to jacket pocket, to folder, to wallet, to gate agent, to help desk and couldn’t help but feel that they looked about as fresh as she felt.

Bongani accepted the sad pieces of paper. “Let me make a call,” he said with a slight bow that didn’t extend past his shoulders.

“Allison while he’s doing that, do you want to try to call the Johannesburg airport again and see if anyone can explain why the bags didn’t get on that flight?” Lauren suggested it partially because it might be helpful, but mainly because she really wanted to get Allison away from the counter. You could say her attitude towards Bongani was counterproductive. 

“Yeah, good idea.” Allison said, taking the bait.

Lauren stood there alone for a few moments of respite and tried to take deep breaths. She had been trying to tell herself all day that the luggage was lost and would probably never be found. She was trying to wrap her head around it, while every minute she remembered another item zipped in those packing cubes. Her boss’s binoculars. Her birth control. The earrings she had bought in Stockholm.

Delta had washed their hands of responsibility for their bags the moment they rechecked them at the South African Air counter in Johannesburg. And if her past dealings with South African Air were any indication of the speed at which they worked, well…she wasn’t feeling very optimistic.

This trip to South Africa had originally been planned for April 2020. Cancelling everything she’d planned had been the final, sinking realization that COVID was frighteningly serious, and wasn’t going away any time soon.

Shockingly, more than a year later, a deposit had shown up in Lauren and Allison’s accounts – South African Air had refunded them for their flights! They celebrated with a glass of Chenin Blanc at New York City’s only South African restaurant on the Upper East Side and dreamed of the day they could rebook and make their bucket list trip a reality.

And three years later they thought that the time had finally come. Everything had been rebooked. The flights, the hotels, the tours, the museum tickets, the dinner reservations. They were ready.

But from the second their flight from LaGuardia had been delayed, Lauren had been getting a worse and worse feeling. As someone who believed in signs and listening to what the universe was trying to say, Lauren had a sinking feeling that the universe was saying, “go home – you’re not supposed to get your perfect trip to South Africa. You weren’t in 2020 and you’re not now!”

A delayed flight from LaGuardia to Atlanta.

A missed connection on the once-a-week direct flight from Atlanta to Cape Town.

24 hours in Atlanta.

A rebooked flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg. 

A connecting flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town.

And now, lost luggage and a day spent at the airport instead of hiking Table Mountain or looking down on the beautiful city from Lion’s Head.

Lauren tried to reconcile reality with what she had been dreaming of for three years.

Bongani walked back towards the counter and snapped Lauren out of her own swirling thoughts.

“I’m sorry. They don’t know anything. I have to make a few calls on other cases, but then I’ll try someone else, OK?”

Lauren nodded with a sad smile.

As Bongani walked back towards the ever-ringing phone, Lauren yelled, “thank you for trying” and hoped that he heard her.

Allison returned with a similar expression. Defeat.

“No luck?” Lauren asked.

“They’re going to try to get the woman I spoke with this morning to call me back. But whoever I spoke with had no idea what I was talking about.”

It was Lauren’s time to snap.

“I don’t want to do this anymore. I know we could go to a mall and buy clothes and be reimbursed by travel insurance but I really just don’t want to be here, dealing with this anymore.” Lauren was shocked that she had said these words out loud, but she could no longer deny that this wasn’t fun. This didn’t feel like vacation. This felt awful.

“I know this is terrible but they’re things,” Allison said in her most soothing expression. “We can buy new things. But we’re here in South Africa! We are still here!”

“It just feels like the universe is trying to tell us something. Every single thing that could have gone wrong has gone wrong.”

Bongani had been slowly approaching the counter and overheard the conversation as it unfolded and now interrupted.

“Do you know who you spoke to at the Johannesburg airport this morning?”

“Yes!” Allison said excitedly and she handed him a piece of paper with the woman’s name.

“OK, let me try them again.”

Bongani walked away and Lauren sank to the ground. She had no decorum left in her.

“I’m going to go call my parents and let them know where we’re at.” Allison said. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah. I will be.”

As Allison walked off Lauren alternated between sitting on the airport floor and pacing back and forth in front of the counter while Bongani continued to scribble numbers, talk on two phones at once, send emails, and move luggage around.  

When Allison reappeared, it was again time for a role reversal as Lauren jumped into action to calm her sobbing friend.

“I think I’m having a panic attack,” Allison declared as she sat down on the floor drawing her knees in close to her chest. 

“No, nope. We are not doing that right now,” Lauren said as she squatted down beside her. “Breathe. In and out – like that Peloton meditation we did last night. We are a team and we are going to figure this out!”

Out of the corner of her eye, Lauren saw Bongani approaching the counter and stood up.

“I have good news!” Bongani said. “Johannesburg airport found your luggage! Now I just need to make a few more calls to find out which flight it’s going to be on.”

“Oh my God, thank you! Thank you! What’s your name?” Lauren asked.

“Bongani!”

“Bongani, thank you! We aren’t going to leave. We’re just going to stay here until you find out what plane it’s on OK?” Lauren gushed.

“OK, I’ll be back,” Bongani said as he turned back to his office.

By now Allison had also managed to stand up.

“Holy shit,” she said. “Do you really think we might see our stuff again?”

“Bongani is legitimately my hero if he can get those suitcases here,” Lauren said.

For the next 15 minutes the girls paced back and forth in front of Bongani’s window. 

Finally, he hung up the phone and turned to them with an ear-to-ear grin.

“I have tracking numbers and your bags will be landing at 7:20 PM!” he proudly announced.

“BONGANI! I can’t believe you did it!” Lauren yelled.

“BONGANI FOR PRESIDENT!” Allison cheered.

“Seriously, we cannot thank you enough – you must have been on the phone for three hours for us. Thank you, thank you. You saved our entire trip!” Lauren said, still in disbelief.

“You’re welcome! I’m just doing my job. I like helping people!” Bongani said humbly.

“Do you think it’s OK if we get food and come back closer to 7?” Allison asked.

“Yes, yes. You can eat. I will track the flight and I won’t leave until the plane lands!” Bongani assured them.

Lauren and Allison walked back into the hustle and bustle of the airport and forced themselves to eat something, despite lingering nerves that this was all just another pipe dream.

They still had hours to kill, so they shopped around, eventually settling on a gift card from one of the vendors as a thank you to Bongani. 

Eventually, being away from the constant circling conveyor belt started to give them anxiety and they returned to baggage claim to wait. And wait. And wait.

As they sat on a bench and asked each other questions like, “How long do you think it will be until all the states in the United States decide they want to split up?” and “When do you think we’ll be living on other planets?” Bongani would stop by and give them periodic updates.

“The plane took off!”

“The plane will land at 7:17 PM!”

“They haven’t assigned a baggage claim number, but I will let you know when they do!”

“7! It’s going to come in on 7!”

By then, it seemed like Bongani was almost as excited as Lauren and Allison to see their bags.

At 7:24 PM the belt at claim number 7 started up and Lauren and Allison couldn’t bear to stand next to it. Instead, they sat on their bench and watched through moving bodies, whispering under their breath.

“Come on, come on…”

“Please be here. Please!”

And there they were. One in front of the other. Purple Samsonite with an orange bandana. Blue Swissgear with a Vera Bradley floral luggage tag. 

The only way to celebrate was by wheeling their bags over to Bongani’s window and jumping up and down, cheering in a trio of voices.

Lauren handed him the gift card while Allison snapped a selfie.

Bongani hadn’t only changed the trajectory of their vacation. Bongani had taught them a valuable and life-altering lesson. When everything is going wrong, all it takes is one person willing to help. One person can change everything.