From Riches to Rags: An African Odyssey, Part XV / Administrative Airstrike: Paperwork, ProBoxes, and the Muzungu Who Shouldn’t Have Survived

“Kalli!!” I bellowed into my phone like a man trying to hail a submarine from a mountaintop—because somewhere deep in the imploding jungle of my logic, I’d decided that volume was a valid substitute for poor network reception.

8,000 kilometres away, in a land where traffic was safe and paperwork didn’t come with a risk of rabies, poor Kalli—my trusted aviation mechanic, involuntary life coach, and emotional punching bag—was either enjoying a well-deserved coffee break and cigarette number 49. Or maybe—far more likely—he was trapped in the hangar, enduring yet another airborne sermon from a pilot explaining the spiritual significance of altocumulus cloud patterns, how he once forgot to file a flight plan and lived to tell the tale, or that time he courageously descended to 1,500 feet over Schleswig-Holstein potato fields without wetting himself.

Kalli, to his eternal credit, had the rare talent of appearing mildly interested while mentally preparing for his own funeral. He radiated the calm resolve of a man who had long ago accepted that the only cure for pilot arrogance was meteorite impact. He’d concluded—correctly—that the world would be a better place if it came with fewer pilots, and even fewer stories involving them.

And yet, there he was. Somewhere between reanimating a crumpled Cessna, stripping screws with holy rage, and asking himself for the thousandth time why pilots consistently displayed the cognitive resilience of whipped cream in a sauna.

But not today.

Because now, his phone vibrated off the workbench like it was trying to escape the conversation. It flailed across the surface like a possessed pancake, clearly desperate to flee the incoming catastrophe screeching down the line—me, in full-blown nuclear panic mode.

As I screamed into the receiver with the sheer unfiltered panic of a man whose hair was on fire, whose pants had vanished, and who had just realised that his aircraft paperwork had been accidentally fed to a camel named “Captain.”

“I need your help!” I shrieked—because nothing says casual cross-continental favour like roaring down the line like you’re being mauled by bureaucracy in a back alley.

“Can you please call the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt and tell them to ACKNOWLEDGE my license? I’m standing at the KCAA and they’re looking at my paperwork like it was printed on pharaoh’s toilet papyrus and faxed in from Narnia’s DMV.”

There was silence. A long one. The kind of silence that thickens the air, curdles your optimism, and makes distant galaxies go, “Yikes.”

Then—plunk.

I’m fairly certain his cigarette dropped into his coffee mug. Followed by the faintest sizzle, like the dying breath of hope. I could also hear him rolling his eyes so hard they might’ve developed friction burns. Possibly—just possibly—he whispered to himself:

“Why me, Lord? Why always me?”

Somewhere on his end, tools stopped clinking. A wrench paused mid-air. Possibly a pigeon burst into flames. It was the audible sound of a man whose mental hard drive had just blue-screened from sheer exposure to my existence.

He didn’t yell. He didn’t curse. He didn’t hang up.

He simply… processed.

Like a veteran bomb technician staring at yet another suspiciously ticking suitcase marked "URGENT: FROM MARCEL."

And then, finally, in the slow, emotionally injured tone of a doctor informing a patient that licking power tools will not regrow neurones, he spoke:

“Marcel… what the hell did you do now…? I’m actually rather busy at the moment—with my head jammed inside an engine compartment the size of a beer crate, one hand holding a wrench and the other acting as an oil filter. Can we maybe, perhaps, talk later?”

An opening excerpt from this chapter remains available here.
The full manuscript is currently reserved for submission and publication.

Marcel Romdane,

—signing off… professional hostage of his own chaos.

Victory at KCAA – The Day Aviation Bureaucracy Burned