The Global Gratitude Show with Vince Rossi

0:00Welcome to the Global Gratitude Show with Tanya Anderson, where hearts open, kindness connects us and stories of giving light to the world. Each week, Tanya brings you inspiring voices from around the globe, people spreading hope, love and gratitude in their own extraordinary ways. So take a deep breath, open your heart, and get ready to celebrate the power of positivity. Let us together, we're making the world a little brighter. One thankful story at a time. Hello, everyone, and thank you for tuning in, much appreciated. I am joined by former fellow Pan Am flight attendant Vince Rossi, who I met in 1993. Two years after Pan Am went bankrupt, all of us international airline employees were hungry for more adventures. The Lake Canilla Crawford, a beautiful lady from Sweden, organized the perfect operation for those who were super flexible.

1:00Now, I'd like to explain a little bit about the Nigerian Hodge. Once a year, Muslims from around the world make a pilgrimage to Mecca. And I understand that currently it's about 3 million a year in over like a three month period. From there, they're flying in from more than or flying in coming anyway, from more than a hundred countries, so you can understand why it's a 24-7 operation. Almost all the crews, the pilots flight attendants and mechanics, were former Pan Am employees. Cisro Fain, now Dr. Fain, and I trained the Nigerian flight attendants. I'll never forget when the girls curtsy as I handed them the skinny manual. It was already becoming a different world in culture, you know, for us. So we're going to be 4 Pan Am flight attendants and 10 Nigerian flight attendants on our 747s, which held 480 passengers. It was indeed a 24-7 operation. At Pan Am, we used to say, you call it the world, we call it our home.

2:03So, welcome Vince, there's so much to discuss about this marvelous Hodge operation. Hey, Tonya, my dear friend, how delighted I am that you invited me to join you and to share some input with your listeners. And I'm also quite honored. I would like to also thank your listeners for joining us today. And also to thank you for the words you chose to actually name your show, because words convey meaning, right? And now more than ever, we need global. We need to be looking at our whole world and our connectedness in it, and we also need gratitude always. I think that gratitude is to be grateful for the gift of life and what it conveys. It's the gateway and the doorway to every other blessing, every other light, every other good thing. So I think you and your listeners have your hands on the pulse of something, even with the name of your program, honored to be here with you. Thank you so much. Wow, that's so beautiful. Thank you so much. You're so good. I mean, you've always been so incredibly spiritual. You're just, you're really out there when it comes to understanding the laws of the

3:05universe, so to speak. So tell us, what was your life context at the start of the Hodge in 1993? It was very interesting. I was 25 years old. So you can imagine a 25 year old young man wanting to continue the adventure that he had experienced as a flight attendant with Pan Am. I had briefly left Pan Am to return to graduate school, and my plan was to go back to Pan Am after I completed a master's for a doctorate. But the biggest thing I learned in graduate school was that I missed aviation, kind of the smell of the jet fuel and theory and practice, and I'm more interested in the practice. And so I saw in the Miami Herald an ad, you know, looking for adventures, aviation type adventures. And I was, I was actually at the grad school in Point and Beach, Florida on these coasts who took the trial route down to Miami, and the splendid, she's a grand dom of aviation going to look for a grand dom. Absolutely. And airlines, I believe, right? And everybody adores everybody, world newer, everybody, well, at the time, United, all

4:09these different airlines. Exactly. And she was there recruiting. And so to meet her, she had been my instructor during Pan Am flight attendant training in 1988. And I remembered her, but they were very encouraging. It sounded like a magnificent adventure. And Pan Am at that point was gone. So my plan had been kind of changed. Before Pan Am, I did my undergraduate at New York University and NYU, the degrees I have from NYU are international politics and near and Middle Eastern civilizations. Perfect. And so the world of Islam or the, or that part of the world was something I had studied again in theory. And at Pan Am, maybe I had an introduction to some of it, you know, the Karachi layover, you get there at three in the morning and just about settling in at the Sheraton and there's a mosque right next door and the midnight, the late night call to prayer comes, you know, prayer is better, you know, I remember that the first time thinking, I know exactly what this is. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I'm hearing it.

5:09So for me, this new adventure was a no brainer. For me. And I'm happy that I was able to participate. I mean, I think I got vision and light and illumination. And of course, helping others in their quest to find God. I mean, at that point, I was a very devout Roman Catholic. I still. Christian, and I still, you know, follow kind of the, maybe the traditions of the church from a distance, but this notion of helping people on their journey, we ended up on a pilgrimage to with them, even, even, and that was a conclusion I drew at the end. So I said, yes, not just yes, but heck yes, where do I start? Left grad school and joined a team for the Cabo Air Hodge for Chief Cabo from Nigeria to Saudi. It was so amazing. And I've got to say this briefly because you reminded me of it when I was writing my book. You said, Tony, don't you remember when we buzzed, and I completely forgotten about it. And this is what the value of like when you're writing your memoirs, having your good friends

6:11who know you well to read them, because they point out things that you missed and to the listeners. I want to say it was really funny. So we're in a 747, we're, we're fairing, which means only, you know, only us onboard the cruise. And the pilots were kind of laughing and stuff. So we arrive, we fly from Miami, over to Coduna, which is like in the middle of Nigeria. And we start coming in. It's a 747, it's a big airplane, you know, and like buzzing, buzzing the villagers. And you can see, and the earth is red, the earth is red. So you can see these white camels and goats and donkeys and they're all brain and bucking because they're not used to, who's used to that kind of stuff, you know, we're not even used to it. So it's amazing that I was glad that you, that you reminded me of it. So tell me, some of your fond memories about the Hodges, which you were our passengers. What, what interested me a lot about the Hodges was their, their, their internal beauty and also their external beauty.

7:12And what I, what I do remember, because of, because of the right, the rights of Hodges, the, the participants of Hodges, they must go into a sacred state of Iran. Many, many earthly things they have to desist from doing, right, because really at the point they get to the Red Sea, they really should be prepared for the rights of Hodges. So part of that on our airplanes with, with Chief Cabo's operation was the men and the women were separated in the cabin. So their husband conceivably would be in the front of the aircraft and the ladies would be in the back. And I was so lucky because if the 747, some of your, your listeners might know this also, but the 747 has five doors on each side plus an upper deck. I was at the left side door in the very back of the aircraft. And what is that prayer, blessed are you among women? I was blessed among, I was blessed among all of these African women. And I really, I really did stay in, in that back part of the aircraft. And some of the things I remember, one of the, one of the strongest memories and again,

8:13you know, a few years earlier, I had, I had been working on Pan Am where I'd be handing a Givenchy piece of luggage, a tote bag to some lady in first class or to share or somebody, which was wonderful. Right, right. Well, one of my most solid memories was at the end of a flight. We had gotten into Jeddah so they were, they were leaving us five hours across Sub-Saharan Africa. They were leaving us to go do the rights of Hodges. And a lady came to me and she had her possessions, whatever she was taking in her hands. And she's handing them to me. So I thought she wanted me to walk her to the stairs to, no problem. She was a young woman. She was not elderly right where I felt she, she couldn't do it herself, but she kept kind of lowering her head. And I just could not make any sense of what it is that she wanted me to do until I finally figured it out. Unlike handing the Givenchy tote bag to share, the lady put the luggage on the top of her head. Oh, right. Of course. Yeah, there you are. That's a perfect example of how things are so different. Yeah. And I did.

9:13It was totally different, right? And there she went. And I stood in the aisle. In the time it took me, the dummy that I am to figure out what she wanted, the other Hodges had left the aircraft. So at that point, it was just me and this lady in the back of the airplane. And so I stood there in that aisle by that moment. I mean, by that because you're spirituality, you're so sensitive and, you know, it, you know, as far as flight attendants are concerned, the Hodges not for everybody, you know, you have to really be flexible. And exactly like you have, and you're the perfect person to be working an operation like that is that you understand all the intricacies and, and all the nuances and it's just a different world. You just sit back and, and you just kind of observe and see, you know, your impressions. And then, you know, how, how can I make, make this better? I mean, how can I make this flight better? It's a different, it's a real learning curve. It's very, very different from, you know, every day, Western flying, but, but that's the beauty of it, too.

10:14It makes it so memorable. I mean, like, just speaking to you now, all these things are coming to my mind, all these memories about the different flights and things and, and how fast we bonded with the flight attendants. It was just amazing. I had the dream team and, you know, and I had Umar and I had Doris and then Ibrahim Dunema, you know, that, that was amazing. I, when I was, it went back to the hotel room and was saying who, we were working out what, what, what crew, you know, who we wanted on our crews. And I, and I put Ibrahim Dunema on my crew. He was, he was back at his home, saying a prayer, praying, asking Allah that, that he would be on my crew. So there was a connection, I mean, and there was like day two or something, you know, what, I mean, and we're not talking about further down the room. There was, there was a media bonding between us, you know, but then there was any stuff like, you know, I want to, he's only 22 years old. He would board the aircraft, he would send a jump, he'd fall asleep by the passengers

11:16are getting on. Hey, baby, what's going on here, you know, but it was amusing. It didn't annoy me. I know, and then, oh gosh. And then one time one of them, oh, they were doing the demo and he, he said, the passengers were just looking, but he, he said, this is how you use the life vest in case we crash into the red sea in inshallah. And the passengers looked like it's another day of paradise. And I'm like, get us being like, oh my God, he didn't just say that. Did you? Because they all speak English, of course. So I'm like, oh my gosh, oh Lord, so basic, probable set of memories. And to discuss it now with you, it evokes more, I mean, you feel it. You start to feel, and that's, I mean, for me too, the experience of Haji was, and whether you're a believer in any religious tradition or any deity, it's an experience of both imminence and transcendence. Yes. Good, good. You gave with Ibrahim.

12:16I mean, there was an imminent need for you to have a crew and to have people on the crew that you were training, whoever they would be while you were making that list. That was an immediate, imminent, worldly need. But somehow there was also some kind of transcendence in a hope that he had that ended up being fulfilled without you're really knowing it until he told you later. The same thing with the Haji's. I mean, I remember my recruiter at Panam, she said to me, one of the things that really struck us, and we had, as you know, we had a series of interviews, including an interview given in the language we said that we spoke other than English, but she said one of the things you said to us that really struck us was, when you approach an aisle of four people, one could be going to a funeral, their mother died that morning, one could be on every week and they're going on a business trip. And the other two are on a trip that they've saved their entire lives for. And this is just row 17 on the airplane in the middle. Exactly right. Yes. How the eyes to see that. Now on Haji, they all have the same, this is different. They all have the same goal, the rights of Haji, but people are also in different spaces

13:18and locations in terms of their own spiritual life. The flight attendants, I mean, the crew I was on, there were four persons from Panam and we were all male. And then we had a mix of a female and male flight attendants, but they were wonderful. They couldn't do enough for the people. And I think they were very honored because most of them were rather young. And they were actually, you know, in addition to the compensation they were receiving for the flying, they would conduct the rights of Haji themselves. And for someone that young to come back as a Haji or Haji is really powerful, I think for them. And I think it really affected a lot of them beautifully. And to see that glow when we came back, yes, yes, get the blessing from them, you know, putting their hands on our head. The Haji's too, but also just the crew members that we had worked. And as you said, they were long delays. It's very hot. The aviation infrastructure in Northern Nigeria is not vanished. It's probably more developed now, but then it was not a lot of infrastructure in the scene.

14:18I think it was a caduna. I'm not sure. You know, we flew Madruguri, Sokato, caduna, and cano a little bit. Yeah. I think it was caduna where they only had runway lights on one side of the runway. So the pilots on the approach had a second checklist check, depending on the direction the aircraft was coming in, if you're coming in from the west, you need to land on the left side of the lights. If you're coming in from the east, you have the right side because otherwise you wouldn't be seeing, you wouldn't be getting the runway, right? And I'm sure as they got closer, they could see maybe the more, the other markings, but very, very interesting type of flying, as you said, it's not for everybody. I found it to be invigorating in my return to aviation, A, and B, more of this practice versus theory, because I had studied in grad school and in undergrad about this part of the world and this commitment of people to the rights of Hodg, which is one of the seven

15:21pillars of Islam. I mean, it's something that every Muslim tried to do at least once. And to be around that, and years later, I mean years later, I was a 9-11 first responder for the federal government at ground, ground zero in New York. And years later, seven, eight years later, when that was happening and I was standing there and I was listening to politicians or the media sensationalized that Islam is bad, Muslims are bad. Oh, I must have just upset you so much. Yeah, it was, it was bad enough to be in the situation we were in, right? And my focus, I wanted to focus on that. But what helped me in terms of illumination and light was all of these images of the Hodgis came to me. All my Hodgis came to me. Wow. No kidding. Yes. And I could see some faces and I remember the lady with the bag that wanted me to put the bag on. Yes. Yes. I saw her face in my mind and said, no, not everyone. And what they just did is not Islam, what they did is an abomination, right?

16:25And so that was something I knew theoretically already from studying in school, but you actually have encountered the people, again, this global piece that is the first word in your radio show. Yes. You have to be a beautiful name. Thank you. That is where we engender that kind of being, that kind of way of being. I remember I would, I had a map of Africa. This was, this was before the days of the map on the TV that you see, the people see this, to see where you are when you're flying off kind of map of Africa. And I would take it to different Hodgis in the, in the back and I would trace kind of our route. Oh, that's so cool. Yeah. It's a big deal. Repeat the names of the places. Absolutely. It means so much. And to interject the six of it like again, you know, we're reminding each other of so many things coming. But I've been around Muslims since I was nine years old because in fourth grade, I had, I was going to marry a school in Washington, D.C. as a French school. And one of my best little friends was Khalida Al-Kale. Her father was the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

17:30And I went to her house, went to our right about it, my book went to her house. You know, we used to play it. We're kids. We're nine years old, right? We're a lovely girl, you know? And I looked over the, the mantle and I saw five portraits. Her father in the middle and two women on the right and two women on the left. And I smelled and did wrap. But I wasn't sure what it was. You have to remember, I'm nine years old, you know what I mean? And I stayed in my book, you know, my father came and picked me up. And then I didn't say anything to Khalida. I was just kind of studying it because you know, we'd had our portraits done, you know, my, not my only child, my father and mother and myself. So I was familiar with it. But I waited until my father picked me up and I said, Daddy, it's very strange. The aunties, the wife and the aunties are all above the mantle place. You know what I mean? I was, see, there you go. It's, it's our POV. But, but to come back to what you say, yes, it was very, very frustrating when 9-11 happened. I was actually wearing my name, you know, how we all have our names done in Arabic when we were in, when we were in Saudi.

18:31And it says Tatsyana in Arabic. And I actually, it's 18 karakal, I actually took it off because I thought, I don't want anybody, you know, giving me any dirt or, you know, the misunderstanding that the gap was so large and it upset me so much as it did use is so frustrating. You know, it really is because you just, I wonder, and yet I wonder if, if they had seen the Haji's and spent time with them. Yeah. They would have seen things differently. One thing that was so fascinating about the Haji's and the operational environment, the kind of where they kind of connected was like, and I don't know if it rises to the level in Islam of Hadith. I don't think it does, but it is a tradition in Islam that when you're on Haji, if you look upon the Red Sea, there's special protection from, from blindness, yes, I'm like bringing that up. Yes. Yeah. In a continent where river blindness is prevalent and hopefully things are better now than yes. Yes. That is something that they really wanted. Now, but here we are. We're buzzing across Africa coming in, let's say going into the Haji, because it's, as

19:34you know, we ferry everyone in and we fly everyone in. They get off the plane. We ferry back to pick up more people. It's really an airlift, right? The middle they do their rights of Haji and then at the end, we take them out of Saudi and then back in. Absolutely back in, but flying them in and the Red Sea, Jeddah, which is the airport typically, sometimes they fly into Medina, but more often Jeddah because of the size of the airport, is right on the Red Sea. As you know, the beach resorts that are there that the hotels are on those private compounds with the beach. You can see the airplanes the whole time you're at the beach. Yes. Yes. You know, climbing out or coming in. So you're really very close to the ground and the Red Sea is not that big a body of water for an airplane going 600 miles an hour. I wouldn't want to swim across it, but it's not a body of water. I mean, you're not over it like you would be over the Atlantic or the Med going from Barcelona to Athens or something. Right. So many people as we could to the exit doors to just just peek out the window for one second. If they weren't, say on the window, seat of the aisle, seat 7, 4, 10 across, 3, 4, 3.

20:35So window and center on the outboard, they got it. They didn't have to get up, but the aisles and the four across, if they wanted to see the Red Sea to protect against blindness, they had to get up. And it was a little bit close to landing, but we did archer, I mean, if they had missed it. Now we would do our best because you know those 747 windows are just, are just so big. Right. Right. Sorry, go ahead. Your viewers can't see this, but another aspect of the flying that I want to share with them. You can see it is that we gave up our Adolfo Uniformed Neckwear and so I'm wearing two of them because I've kept them display on, on a wall display in my office. And I think it wasn't our crew because we were all guys and we weren't really looking for neckwear. So it was more the ladies with the senses around us. We were just wearing open, they went and got neckwear and each crew had a different pattern and color.

21:35So I think I'm the only one with the distinction of having two sets of Cabo Air Neckwear because I was recently loaned to your crew or I was loaned to your crew and you gave me the neckwear, the yellow, and then when I came back to my other crew, the crew of all male pursuers, they said, where'd you get that? They said, well, every crew has neckwear and they were like, well, we don't want yellow. We want another color and someone wanted Linda Moore, how somebody went out and neckwear, which is a darker, maybe arguably more masculine color. Right. Of course, it's tied with a guardian angel, right, in the center, that granola Crawford or beloved weed gave us one family for this adventure and I have it to this day. I would love to see, I mean, all of this, as you know, any of your viewers can imagine, it's 1993, there's really no widespread internet, there's no cell phones, there's no, it's a different world than what young people know now. How do we run a charter airline in those days? Is the question, well, in northern Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, but I would love to

22:37see if there's a way to take a kind of, on an app, to take a picture of these textiles, these prints on a certain tribe. I would love to do that. No. No. Now, you're reminding me of two things that I want to say with presidents and the listeners will see why in just a minute. Okay. So, when I met President Obama, he was a senator and I wore an outfit that I had made by my tailor in Kano Emmanuel when I went back to Nigeria after the Hodge and it's got crocodiles on it, but it's exactly that kind of, you know, tribal cloth. And I wore it on purpose when I met Obama. That's that picture of Obama and me. The second thing I want to say is, because you made a reference to River Blindness, of the five presidents, American presidents I've met, I had the longest time speaking with Jimmy Carter, which was probably five and a half minutes, but it was so amazing. And he was signing his point book, right?

23:39So I was waiting in line. He was in Maryland, Suburban, Maryland, and I was waiting in line and I heard some gal say something about, oh, he just got back from Nigeria and I'm like, what? I just got back from Nigeria, you know, because I made so many trips after the Hodge. And I said to words, stand in front of me because the line was kind of logged. So she kind of briefed me, so to speak, right? And when I got up to him, I said to him, Mr. President, I understand you just got back from Nigeria and you've got some news about Guinea worm and River Blindness and he started explaining it. Now he's doing the talking and I'll never forget I was wearing a royal purple sweater. And the sequence service guy started pulling up my sweater, yanking up my sweater and I was like, stop, I'm not doing the talking. If I'm holding up the president, that's one thing. But when the president's talking to me, baby, I'm all ears. I don't keep pulling up my sweater so funny, especially such a humanitarian as president Carter. And the follow-up of that is actually the Carter Center came out to LA last March and they

24:43had a reception in Hollywood that I was invited to and I was a really nice reception. Jason Carter was there, you know, his grandson, who incidentally is very good friends with Steve Ford, President Ford's son, but that's a story for another time, it's a story I love. Anyway, and so they had a film about it, it runs, it wasn't like a documentary about Guinea worm. And it's kind of squeamish, but nobody got up and left, everybody's watching it. And they have made such, the Carter Center has made such great progress with Guinea worm in Nigeria and also River Blindness disease because Nigeria had one of the highest incidents of it. So the listeners that don't know, and I wouldn't expect you to know, is that's like when tribes people go to the river to get water, sometimes they don't know to boil it, but also that the mosquitoes there and the flies, the flies bite you near your eye, you just go blindness,

25:48so it's blind. And they're never informed about it, maybe in recent years they have been at the time. They weren't informed about it, so they don't know, they just, you and I just go to the river to wash our clothes and get some water. And in the meantime, we don't know, we've been infected. So I just wanted to interject that. So what was your initial experience with Africa and your impressions? Well, I'd have to say mine would be similar to yours, the buzzing, the buzzing, that was fabulous. To announce to the Hodges to begin their journey. I was always a little skeptical with the pilots. Maybe they just wanted to buzz the villages and they just said that that was to get them to come. The remoteness of the area and the fact that the communications infrastructure was probably not super then, right? It's highly likely that it wasn't neat. And the same thing, the bragging of the animals, I remember a little boy, there was a walled compound, small walled compound, with the same earth that you were talking about. Yes, yes. Came running out, came running.

26:49We were that low that I could see him. It was amazing. When we got into, I think we flew into Kaduna and the door of the aircraft was open, of course, very flight, just the crew and some equipment. On came a lot of Chief Cabo's associates and the crew, and to welcome us, I can remember so many big smiles, welcome to Nigeria, you're welcome here. And for people that had just ferried overnight, transatlantic, in a type of flying that was new for all of us, I flew many Hodges after that as you did as well. Yes. It was very, very comforting. And the Chief was such a fascinating character. I worked. I was in the back of the airplane. So the activity during boarding is really at the forward doors. So I really never got involved with that. And I was okay because I was really just staying with the ladies back there. And they were just so awesome, so wonderful. But I do have a story about Chief Cabo. It was maybe one of the first couple of days that I was there. We were there. And I was having lunch in the hotel restaurant.

27:49He owns the hotel. I mean, he owned it. Right. I'm sitting there eating lunch and there's this man at a table across from me. And we just start talking and he's very well dressed. I mean, Rolex, I mean, all of this. We had a beautiful conversation. He asked me why I was here and I told him. And it turns out I had no idea it was Chief Cabo. And he laughed. He had to go to a meeting, but my lunch got like ready to pay. And suddenly they said, no, no, you're good. And I said, I think I should pay for my lunch. No, no, no, it's been paid. Don't worry. Well, listen, I'm so glad you brought up Chief Cabo because I am going to give his brother Garba, Garba, Garba Sheetoo Cabo. And I are still good, good friends, lifelong friends to this day. And I'm going to tell you about this broadcast because it's going to be broadcast pretty soon. And I'm going to tell him about it. And I want him to tune in. So because Garba and I were instant friends. And I want to talk about Chief Cabo and give the listeners an idea of how he was.

28:51So the rumor was that he made between $18 and $20 million a year, which is not too shabby, even by Hollywood standards, you know what I mean? But he owned hotels, banks, clinics. And one of the things he owned was pretty, and of course the airline, he had Cabo air. And he actually had purchased 7777s to fly around Nigeria domestically, not part of the hot, just domestic flying, but he also owned Cabo oil. And in the context of oil, the quality of the sweet crude was very good. So you had to mix it with Saudi oil in order to bring it up to like standard to make it, you know, make maximum profit on it. So he was a really enigmatic figure. And he was right out of a film. I mean, he could be very, very generous, but he could also be moody. But to give you an idea of his generosity, you'll remember this, because this just blew me out. So in Nigeria, at the time, I don't know about now, at the time, everybody made like $25

29:55a day, I'm sorry, $25 a month. So if I'm your chauffeur, I'm your maid, I'm your houseboy, I'm your runner, I'm, I don't know what the flight tends to be made, but that was usually the thing. I'm your chauffeur, I'm making $25 a month. So Chief Cabo purchased, I think, four vans to move us around, move the cruise around, okay? And it said, you know, Hodge, 93 operation, Cabo air on the side. And the chief said that the flight attendant that did the best job would get one of those vans. Now that's really cool, except now you don't have the salary to maintain it. You know what I'm saying? You got a whole bunch of new friends, we could drive around and style, but, you know, so it was impractical, but, but he could be like that. And he, there was always something, there was always something new going on with him. And to give you an idea of how he spent money, when we were in Jeddah for the, for the

30:58backside of the Hodge, and he was there, and I actually went there, because MD Hassan invited me to come. He had rented the Chief Cabo, had rented a Marbavilla in Jeddah at $2,500 a night for three months. So you guys can do the math. You know what I mean? He wants. And it was funny, because I called one day to talk, to speak with the chief, and the sky answered the phone, and they, see, they could get huffy, do, sometimes the people around somebody well known are huffier than the actual person, you know, and he was, who are you? Who are you? Who are you? And I said, my name is Madonna Antonio, and it trust me, I'm for real. You know? And then MD Hassan came by one day at our hotel in Jeddah, and took me to the villa, and the guy answered the door, and MD Hassan said his name, and said, this is Madonna Antonio, you know? And he goes, oh, and he looks at, I said, I told you I was for real. But another funny thing is too that the, but it was, it was a term of endearment, the flight

32:02attempts that you're in, flight attempts would refer to us as Baturia, me, Baturia, you know, white woman, which is funny, because I'm, I'm, you know, dark hair and dark eyes, and I'll, I'll have skin. And I get kind of dark in the summer, but like you, you're really white, because you have blue eyes and, and light skin, and you and the skin and the navy, and you, you, you guys can go shopping, and the silicone people would just stop and stare at you, because they, they'd never seen, I'm surprised that they didn't actually touch you, because they didn't never seen blonde people, and they'd just look at you, not in a bad way, but, and that leaves me to something else I thought was funny. Okay, you know how we took a lot of candy from the US over there to, to give out to the kids and stuff like that. So one day, it was a really, every, it was just, we were in Conno, we were on the ground, and they're boarding, but, but just kind of a ceremony going on at the same time, and all the kids are dressed up. They look like we used to look when I was a kid in our Sunday best, and they, they look fabulous, right? So I went down and handing out candy to the little girls, it's kind of an impromptu

33:03land line, and this little boy behind him, he's about, he's about six years old, and Bella Coutune, my favorite passenger from Sokato, was there that day too, and the girls were fine. They took the candy, Nago Dees, say, Anjima, you know, they, they go off, and then this one kid, his eyes get his biggest saucers, and he screams, and he runs away. And I said to Ibrahim and Bella, I said, what's wrong? He said, oh, Madame, he has not seen white people before, and his parents are brought him up. Ibrahim made this come. He said, his parents are brought him up to be afraid of white people. And then Bella said, in, in, in our culture, some people think if you have blue or green eyes, it's like cat's eye, he's just like, okay, I said, I've had people run away from me before, but not because I was white. Maybe for other reasons, but I did, I did experience what you're talking about, walking outside,

34:05and especially in Madougar, where it was even less developed, I think, with the people just really, you know, you're, you're almost like a movie star to them, they're all the difference, right? It's so different. And I wanted to say this too, on the backside of Hodge, we stayed in Jeddah. That was a really fabulous experience as well, because now, now we're living in Jeddah, which was entirely indifferent from saying in the hotels in Nigeria. And one of the beautiful things about that, it was 1993, and one of my dearest friends on the planet, Mahmoud Zahid, I had not seen him since 1970, so it had been 23 years. And I, you know, in those days, we had phone books, right? So we get to the hotel, and I look in the phone book, and I see the number, I said, can't be that easy, but I decided to call. And his wife, Mona, answers, and I thought, no, can't be that easy. And she says, oh, yes, and I said, it's just the home of Mahmoud Zahid. And she said, yes, and I went, and she said, yes, we have a picture of him at Millfield

35:06School on the wall, and I went, oh my god, jackpot, I couldn't believe it. And, but the other beautiful thing about that is, not only have put me in touch with them again, which was just golden, because it came and took me out to dinner. Now I've been in touch with them ever since, you know, their lifelong friends, but, you know, if you call an American wife and say, I'm looking for Vince Rossi, and she's going to say, who is this, they're going to say, oh, yeah, I'm sure he'll be happy to see you again. We'll come and take you out to dinner. You say, who is this? Oh, what do you want? It was gold, and it was just, and it was so thrilled to be in touch with Mahmoud again. So, oh, there's so much to speak about. So what was your initial experience out of Saudi Arabia? It was also fascinating. It was, it was not my first time in Saudi, because with Panam, we had flown to Riyadh and Dharan, but Jetta was new. And I remember the first time we flew in with Haji's, it was night when we were landing and all of the mosques.

36:07Again, this theme of eminence and transcendence for me and of light and vision. The minarets of the mosques are always lit green, right? There's a green light, green color of life. And I mean, we see this in Christian liturgical practice, too. They use green for liturgical vestments in certain seasons of the year, et cetera. So this notion of green or, you know, even St. Heldergod of Bing, and coined a term in the Middle Ages, you know, vereditas, the greenness of things. This is way before the environmentalists appeared. Oh, yeah. And to say this really quickly, embo green is also the color of healing. That's why I wore an embo green silk suit the day I met at present Mandela. Anyway, so go ahead. Tell me, tell me. And green, again, there's a lot conveyed there. So I think my first thing was that it was dark as night and yet green light was everywhere. This green light. And I knew, again, I knew theoretically from my NYU studies of the trappings of a mosque, the accoutrements of a mosque. I knew already that's what I would see, but to actually see it for the first time.

37:09It was incredible. And also the hotel was very close to the old suit. And it was nice when I was there. You became friends with the men that did the chicken shwarma, or with the men that did the juices, the tomogran and juice on your walk. I mean, you would see them. And they would, you'd wave. You wouldn't always stop and buy, or the ones that did the Afghani bread, where they threw the dough into this clay oven, like it was almost like a well, but it was so hot and they was throwing on the wall. And it would literally bake stuck to the side of the wall. And they would put those big pizza things. And so to spend time just trying out a little bit of Arabic, and of course the food is interesting and beautiful, delicious, and to feel for that period of time, like a part of the community there. Because I would be, I'd be gone maybe for a day or two for flying. And they'd say, where were you? I didn't see you walking past because I would walk to the sink every day. A lot of people would trundle into cabs. I preferred the exercise. And also the being truly present, and the sensory, you know, sound, smell, sight, hearing,

38:17the feel of maybe the desert on your skin when the Hormatin comes, the dust, the sand. Yeah. And so for me, the walking was just, it was amazing. And again, it was another iteration of this theory that I had learned in school in practice. This was the place. And these were the customs and the traditions and the history. You're at the source. Right. This is it. I mean, these people are going to do Hajj. Here is an old villa for Lawrence of Arabia in the middle of the soup. Here it is. I'm looking at it. You know, that was going to bring that up. And it's a really cool looking building. Yeah. It's amazing. And I wanted to say this as well. I had, because I have to take Uber a lot when I'm in Houston. And I had a driver, a Syrian driver one time. And we got speaking right away. And I asked him if he'd ever been on the Hajj and he said no. And I started to describe several things to him. One of the things I told him about was the prophet's mosque, how you can see it from 35,000 feet. It's just so bright and so brilliant. He loved that. And then I told him about Prince Turkey Albin, the sound who I know from my high school

39:22in England, Millfield School, who, when in 98, when we were also in Jeddah, he came by and took me out to dinner and we caught up on, you know, all the years. And, you know, being a prince, he was allowed to go inside the caba. So I couldn't wait to ask him what that was like. And I started, excuse me, I started describing it to this Syrian driver. And he said, he didn't use the word goosebumps, but that's what he meant. He said, you are giving me goosebumps. He said, I have to go on the Hajj, I have to perform Hajj. And it was, it was so cool. It made me feel really good, you know, that here again, it's the connection that you speak about. Let's look at what brings us together, not what divides us. What do we have in common? I've read parts of the Quran as I know you have, and it reads so much like the Bible. And one of the things I distinctly remember about it, in and out of the Quran, it says, Alassis, everything you do, in other words, be a good kid because we're watching, you know what I mean? Your easels are watching you for better or for worse, they're watching what you do.

40:24And that was also an enormous takeaway, you know, for me, gosh. So, you know, the dichotomy, the wealth and poverty was really fascinating as well, because like you mentioned, you know, I would make the flight attendant's laugh because I would imitate the way they said, Madame, Madame Tony, how can you tell? I said, Tony, just call me Tony, how can you tell who the wealthy people are? Well, it's not only the way they address, but the way they walk and I would imitate it. And I'd have them in fits of laughter. And as you can remember, I think we only had eight seats upstairs in the, because there's a little 720, some 747 100, so there are only eight seats in the upper deck. So you know, these heavy hitters have four wives. So I mean, you know, it's like scrambling for like, okay, do you outright me, you know, you got more, you got the wives, I got the wives, okay, who gets to sit up there, which is pretty amazing. But then some of the other officials were so remarkable to meet like Mohamed Gassal,

41:25who's the governor of Sokato State. And he was so handsome and, and Bella was teasing me about him. One day, Bella came and he's laughing and I said, I said, Bella, what's so funny? He said, Ahaji, Mohamed Gassal knows that you kind of have the hots for him. And his wife, his wife's had a big argument over it last night. Now, you're already sharing, like each wife is already sharing it with three wives. What's wrong if bacteria comes from the US, you got another one in the picture, you know what I mean? It's like, so it's just a different world out there. But let me see, the colors as well, oh, but what I, something else I want to talk about the dichotomy of the wealth and the poverty. And I want to say this, but with all due respect, and I know you probably had some experience with this too. I've actually been to two leprosilters in Nigeria and one in India, another tree says leprosilter. But every now and then, you know, we would hand them their lunch, it would be a brown bag with like a chicken leg and an egg in it, maybe a slice of bread.

42:28And then every now and then somebody would reach up for the bag, missing some fingers. And they were lepros. But you just treat them, you know, the goddess me sees the goddess you, you know, you just treat them like anybody else. And they're going on the hatch. So this is really, otherworldly for them, it's really out there, you know, and so you just treat them with respect because we recognize that they got in each other, right? You know? Completely agree. And one of the principles of the hajj is when the hajj puts on their garments, the white garment, they're all equal before Allah. So something that they're trying to convey, I mean, obviously they're real, they're realities, right? But again, we're back to eminence and transcendence. And this imminent now world, there's, there are bank accounts, there are Rolex watches, there are Ferraris in the transcendent world of the hajj in this era, in their white garment, the message that is being sent to everyone senses is you're all equal. One thing I did worry about with the hajj is, you know, especially some of the elderly

43:32ones was it, you know, the temperatures in Saudi are very hot. The rights of hajj are, are rigorous. Yes. Absolutely. And the desert under, you know, in conditions that are difficult, and these are probably generally very strong, tough people anyway. But obviously, you know, they will say to die doing the hajj is basically a ticket to paradise would be, you know, what the theologians and the, and the Islamic scholars would say. Right. But I would, I myself looking for on the return flight someone I might have had on the outbound that I thought they're really kind of old. And the odds weren't against me that I'd see them again, but I really wanted them to be home and back okay. The other thing that was really fascinating about it was the aircraft itself or one of the aircraft that we use was November and the registration was N747 Papa Alpha. It was the second, the second 747 ever made and the first one delivered to Pan Am. And it was the Clipper Want Trip, a Wantie trip, although it had started as Clipper America. Okay. Was christened Want Trip in 1980, probably after his death, I think, I think that was

44:36the time of his death. Okay. But it still had the Clipper name and it bore and I thought, well, my goodness, this is an airplane that's 26 years old, but it had received the modifications and the structural modifications because Pan Am participated in the civil reserve fleet. Airplane. Yeah. Right, right, right. Right. And we wanted an award for it because we could we could transform a passenger configured to 425 seats to moving material and stuff they'd won an award for it in 30 hours, 30 hours. And we thought we were going to have to do that for the first goal for, but in the end, it didn't have to happen, you know, worked out. You know, I just want to say something about Ebrahim Dunham II, which is very cool, I think. So his father had four wives and in Nigeria, how you introduce somebody as you say, well, this is Tonya, she's the daughter of wife number three, that like in the pecking order, my wife number, you know, off string, a wife number one on down the line.

45:40But Ebrahim had 23 brothers and sisters and I just, and he had deep scars that he, they had done when he was a baby, they'd taken razor blade and tribal scars, you know, and, but he and I bonded in just such such a wonderful, wonderful way. And he would, we were talking about cultural things and I love when he said to me at the very end of it, because we actually had, we lost engine number four on takeoff from Jedi once we had a fire and engine number four. And the loadmaster came running down the fire staircase and said, we're going right back in, but we were kind of heavy because we were gassed up for a five hour flight. So we had to dump, dump some fuel and then, you know, and then land. It was okay. A little bit of trouble declaring an emergency because, you know, print sex wise, you can go ahead. So, you know, in his Gulf Stream, and forget the 480 passengers on a plane that airplane just got on fire, but, but it was all good. We actually, we, but we didn't blow 10 out of 18 tires.

46:41So it had to ferry to London the next day and get them all replaced. But one of the last things Ebrahim do not ever said to me was, well, we're getting ready to go back to the States. He said, I liked the pilots and they were very good when there was a fire. But then he narrowed his eyes and he said, but they do not fly the plane, a law flies the plane. And I said, yes. I'm fine. I'm not fine with that. You know? And when they, when the, when the flight intense came back from the Hodge, I committed a big faux pop. But I didn't know it. They, they were so excited, like you say, they're running across the tarmac, you know, they got all, they're in all their gorgeous colors and everything. They're so thrilled. Everyone has a gold tooth. That's a symbol they've been on the Hodge. Now you address them as, as Haji, uh, Ibrahim Haji, uh, you know, whatever, whatever I mean up, for example. And they're all excited. They get all up and asal. We have a little bit of time for the passengers to get going on board and we're talking about it. And I kissed Ibrahim on the cheek and the girls just squealed with delight.

47:43They said, Tonya, you cannot touch the men. I'm like, okay, I'm well too late now. It was so, it was so amazing, but they were all radiant. I can't see or as a boy, I couldn't feel them and I know you can't do. They were radiant. And then as you mentioned, I think early you said something about, they go home and then in Northern Nigeria, they paint a caba on the side of their house so that anybody passing by, whether you know them, you don't know them, knows that somebody in that house has performed Hodge. So that's, that's another really, really wonderful ritual. Oh, it's a beautiful thing. It's, it has to do with, I think, sense of community and sense of encouragement to others, right? Yes. Yes. You too. I mean, we of course went to Greece because the airplane, while when the inbound airlift was over and the pilgrims were doing the rights of Hodge, we wanted to do maintenance on the airplane, right? So we spent some time relaxing in Greece before going back to pick them up. And yet, even on the beach in Mekinos, I was maybe more into theory than practice than

48:47I thought, because I was reading like the poetry of Nana Asmao, who was a Nigerian princess from the early, late 18th, early 19th century, from the, from the caliphate of Sokato, which was one of our destinations, one of the places where we were picking people up. And she actually was in some ways a feminist and in some ways, maybe lightly subversive because she had women called Jaji, who became teachers and taught other women. And they wore a hat with a red sash to identify this, this idea of, of Islamic learning. And a lot of her poetry, obviously, I'm not reading in the original Fulani or the house or the Arabic that she would have written in, but, you know, I was reading the English translations. And a lot of them are, are spiritual. She's, she's borderline Sufi, the mystics of Islam, but to be in Greece and still be captivated like I'm laying on the beach in Mecanos and I'm reading Sufi poetry from a woman in Nigeria who was, who was born in the 1700s, was crazy.

49:50And of course, for any woman in the 1700s to be a poet, that was no small feat, right? Anywhere in the world. Yeah, good for her. Very good for her. And I did a lot of reading as well like, uh, Sully Wojinka. I did reading a lot of the reading of the Fulani creation stories and creation myths. So I guess I'm, I'm theory and practice and I was theory and practice even on the halj even then. But that time in Greece was magnificent. Yeah. Oh, it was absolutely incredible. And I remember, you know, uh, being in Mecanos, it was actually a full moon going on. It was something right out of a film. It was amazing. And then the day that we rented the boat and went around, uh, to the Paradise Beach and then we went to that lagoon and, uh, and, uh, Wally did a swan dive, Captain Wally. Oh, he did a swan dive and I have a picture. I mean, too bad we didn't have like the kind of cameras then that we have now. It's a bit grainy, but still. And I think you're in the water and you're looking up at him or maybe you took the picture. I, I can't remember, but it was just, it was remarkable.

50:52It was, it was just so, so incredibly, uh, memorable. Um, yeah, it was fun. It was just, and it was so, it was so hard to say goodbye to everybody because we've been through three months of this intense interaction. And 24 seven, like I mentioned earlier, and doing all these things together. And now we go back to, we go back to Miami and Ganilla's there. And she's written Welcome Home Hodges on, on the sheet and she's holding it up. And every time a couple more of us would come out of, uh, customs, you know, immigration, all that. Uh, she, she would drop the sheet and go and hug us and then we got on the van to go to the hotel. And we're all interrupting each other because we're so excited. We have so many things to tell. We don't even know where to start. It was just like so remarkable. Bless her. She, she was so, so amazing. And, uh, I know you wanted to say a few things about, uh, like Linda and Ganilla. And well, he breathed, he breathed also is no longer with us as well.

51:53He breathed him tragically. I think, I think on butterfly's wings, you recount the story, right? He was very young in a car accident. Yes. Yes, yes. A motorcycle accident in Nigeria. And then some of our flying partners, you know, the great Ganilla Crawford, again, grand Donald Aviation and Linda OJ, the Montana form girl. I know. She, she was, she had the biggest green eyes of anybody I've ever met. And that, that was another story. I remember one, one time back in Ezone, this, this, uh, you'll remember the story. This lady, uh, passenger with a young baby. And it was kind of funny. It kind of reminded me of when we were kids. We used to like to watch scary movies on Saturday nights at home, you know, on the TV. But then, but you know, you're safe, you're basically safe, you know, but you, but you still want to watch some scary thing and, ooh, ooh, ah, you remember. So this lady, young mother, had, had this baby in her arms and the papers kind of like getting to be the toddler age and, uh, Linda's back there working, like, and the kid

52:54would scream and then bury his, bury his face in his mother, in his mother's shoulder. And then he'd come up for another look and scream again. It just went on. He's having fun. Huh? He's having fun. I know. And, yeah, it's just, it's just, well, East and East West. Again, it's just, just an amazing thing. Uh, wow. It's just, and, and also, uh, we, we did cross the continent of, uh, Africa 28 times. And, uh, we, I learned how to, it has an American to, uh, it was, see, see a whole different way of how Africa is, West Africa, in particular, but also how they view us. I think one of the most valuable things about traveling so much internationally is you get to see how other people in other countries view us, that, that's, yeah, you know, and every, if somebody's going abroad for the first time in the SP for advice, they say, you don't need to tell them what we have because everybody knows what we got through TV's and film, you know, just say to them, you know, like the first time I went to Liberia,

53:58there's not too much going on there, but I know that they have good rubber and, and they have good cocoa. So I was saying to, because Pan Am had a daily flight between, uh, Kennedy and, uh, Mont-Rovia Liberia. And, um, I said, I've heard you have some of the best cocoa in the world. And then in no time, you've got friends because they want to like you and, you know, so you don't need to, y'all, y'all, y'all, y'all, just say, tell me about your country, about your customs. I have a little white dress, I paid $5 for in, um, in Mont-Rovia, and I still have it to this day, you know, and I, and I did return, I took the CDC in there in fall of 2014, uh, when Ebola, when they, when they had an Ebola breakout, but that's a story for another time. So it's pretty amazing. So, uh, I would like you to read for the, uh, for the listeners, the Filani point that you have? Yes. I was reading this poem then in 1993, and I, I, it's, it's really the Filani creation story.

54:59And what, what we see in it is, you know, it's kind of just kind of blaring, Joseph Campbell Power of Myths. We see creation. We see fall. We see redemption. And we see that in the Christian ethos as well. And so this has been for generations, and it wasn't really until the 1960s that some of these were rediscovered. And I'd like to read it to you, actually, sinking of the loss of our beloved Ganilla Crawford and Linda O.J. and Linda Morehouse and the, the, the good young Manny Brahim early, way too early, because I think there's a little bit in the Filani poem about, about the situation, those situations. The name of God for the Filani, a one God, so it's not completely contrary to Islam, the Tajweed, the oneness of God, right? But obviously this is not Islamic, but, so here it is, I'd like to read it to your listeners and, and dedicated to those people that were with us on the Hodge. At the beginning, there was a huge drop of melt. Then Dundari came and he created the stone. Then the stone created iron and iron created fire and fire created water and water created

56:05air. Then Dundari descended a second time and he took the five elements and he shaped them into man. But man was proud. Then Dundari created blindness and blindness defeated man. But when blindness became too proud, Dundari created sleep and sleep defeated blindness. But when sleep became too proud, Dundari created worry and worry defeated sleep. But when worry became too proud, Dundari created death, defeated worry. But when death became too proud, Dundari descended for the third time and he came as Gweino, the eternal one, and Gweino defeated death. Wow, that's really nice, very, very nice, remarkable isn't it, it's just, what an amazing way to see the world, right? What an amazing creation story. Yes, yes. Resonate. I mean, we talk about the differences, but we also talk about the similarities because those things in that story, people everywhere face and absolutely right and thank you for

57:10that. I really appreciate it. Vince, I want to thank you for for being my most honored guest and you're just so remarkable. I knew this would be just amazing and before we sign off, I'd like to give a shout out to my Nigerian friends, Garboshitu Cabo, who's Chief Cabo's brother, my lifelong friend. He's actually House of Fulani, so that dovetails with the point you just read. Lottana Ujuku, who's Ibo and I've known him since 1967, Millfield School, shout out to Lottana and I have a good friend also, who's Europe a tribe. That's Kofa Kima Day and the three tribes that I just mentioned are the major tribes in Nigeria. There are 44 tribes with those are the major ones. So it also, if you, my listeners, if you'd like to read more about Nigeria, I've written, I wrote a chapters about Nigeria, all different aspects of it.

58:11In my memoir on Butterflies, Wings is available for Amazon and I would appreciate you if you tune in next week and I appreciate you tuning in today and I hope you really enjoyed our talk with Vince Rossi. Thank you so much. See you next week. You've been listening to the Global Gratitude Show with Tanya Anderson, here on the Brushwood Media Network. Every week, Tanya brings stories that remind us. Gratitude is a universal language, one that transcends borders, upless hearts and inspires us to give back. If today's conversation touched your heart, share the gift of gratitude, pass this episode along to someone you love and help the ripple of kindness grow. Join us next time for more voices of compassion, joy and hope, celebrating the goodness that unites us all. Until then, remember, be kind, stay grateful, and keep sharing the love.