Bad Things Happen To Good Luggage

When that happens and you show up at the carousel knackered and snelling of depressurised air from the cabin, and your luggage doesn’t come through, you will want to have someone’s head on a spike. 

That someone is Jacob Ogengo. 

So you will yell at him or yell at his people, asking how on earth your bag didn’t make it to Nairobi. He will not tell you about the 99 reasons, however, he will say he is sorry and assure you that you will reunite with your bag. 

Then he will log onto his system and try to trace where your bag is. The system is called World Trace System where your bag is matched based on routing number, tag number, passenger’s surname and type of luggage and content.

 “We strive to have an 85% reunification of these bags with owners over a ten-day period,” he says. That’s what Jacob  aims for. Sometimes it’s 75%. Last month, the number was 79%. Not bad.

However, some bags arrive but are never claimed. People just leave their bags at the airport. Either they forget. Or they don't care to pay for excess baggage as promised. There is a room where hundreds of these bags end up. 

“On the third day, we are required to open these bags in the presence of customs and other airport officials to find clues of owners,”Jacob says. Once opened, the contents of these bags might reveal the owner’s identity but also their age, race, ethnicity, queerness, religion, tastes, and profession. 

“We find all manner of things; sex toys, dried foodstuffs, chocolate, money, jewellery, stuffed animals, electric gadgets…” he says. “The reason we go through these bags is to find any clue that might lead us to the owner. If you’re a traveller, always leave some form of identification in your bag. It helps us trace you.  If we don’t find anything, we hold these bags for three months after which we surrender them to the customs to dispose of them.”

“There was this luggage that was set for surrender to the customs, a nice suitcase,” Jacob says. The suitcase contained important court land documents. “They were sensitive, stuff that you can’t afford to lose. I felt sorry for this chap.”

So Jacob held onto the suitcase for a little longer to try and trace the owner. “Eventually, I found a man with the same name on Facebook. I asked him if he had lost any luggage and he said yes, so I asked him to mention anything in the suitcase that might prove his ownership and he did,” Jacob says. ”We reunited the luggage with this man, many months later, after he had given up.” So sometimes good things happen to lost luggage. 

“For the most part, it’s phone calls after phone calls from people who have lost their bags,”Jacob says. “I can understand how frustrating it is to lose your personal belongings, so I understand when a passenger calls me 20 times in a day.” 

Each flight that lands - and a day could have 1,000  people landing - comes with several passengers  whose luggage is lost. “That’s many phone calls from very unhappy people. It's angry energy coming to me which I have to find a way of defusing diplomatically.” 

His phone never goes off. It’s the phone of bad news, always ringing with a problem to be solved, an ego to be soothed, a bag to be found, and it keeps pinging with messages even when he’s asleep. He carries it everywhere. “But what to do,” he shrugs. “It’s a job.”