For Sale

When Ricky left a message for us to call him. We knew something was up. We took a deep breath and set off for Tasha’s, where we ordered cappuccinos to steady our nerves.

He didn’t disappoint. He had just signed a contract to provide an aircraft for MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. He wanted us to go as the crew because he knew that, as a couple, we were prepared to be away for longer than most pilots. Air tickets between Haiti and South Africa are expensive, so he wanted us to go for five months at a time, with two months off to follow. We countered with four on and two off. Ricky agreed. He wanted us to leave almost immediately, but we had to give three months notice to Comair, so we settled for a start date of the 1^st October.

Bubbling with excitement we headed for the iStore to look at upgrading our computers for the new job. I’m not prone to verbosity, preferring to keep my counsel most of the time. Nicky is normally the extrovert, splashing her 7,000 words about generously and even using some of mine. But suddenly I felt the need to use my daily allocation of 2,000 words all at once. The poor salesman probably didn’t want to know anything about us and I’m sure he didn’t care. But when I let him have the full 2,000 words about our new job in Haiti, how excited we were, and what a huge adventure it would be, he took it on the chin, played along and shook up a cocktail of enthrallment, even though we left empty handed.

A few days later we went in to work to hand in our resignations. They knew why we were there – we hadn’t kept our intentions secret. Between us, Nicky and I had been with the company for almost twenty years and it was not without the occasional lip wobble that we handed in our notice to the Chief Pilot and fielded questions from the curious corridor lurkers.

They say the most stressful things in life are losing a family member, changing jobs, moving house and getting a divorce. We’d just lost Max, resigned from our jobs and were about to put the house on the market. We clung to the hope that the stress from the first three wouldn’t lead to the stress of the fourth.