"Caravan" to Africa

Medevac flight.

I need to catch my flight home this evening, but I wanted to visit Masai territory (in western Kenya) today, to see how mission work is going there. I had an invitation from the Russell and Johnson families of Master's Mission, and an offer from Matt Olson to fly me out there in a 210, and was really looking forward to it. But events intervened to change plans.

Late Saturday night, in a village near Aru in northeast Congo, a man was shot by soldiers. He did not die, but was seriously injured. There are no mission or relief flights into Congo from Uganda now because they have been forbidden by the Ugandans (that's too long a story to address here). Friends of the wounded man sought to send out an appeal for help. By Monday evening they had reached Arua, Uganda, having crossed the Congo/Uganda border by road, and gained access to a two-way radio. They sent an appeal for help to AIM-AIR, which was immediately received in Nairobi.

The man's name was Obtwega. He was a nurse at a small church-run clinic. He had been hit three times, once in each leg, and once in the left forearm. The arm injury, in particular, involved shattered bones, and had no hope of recovery without attention from an orthopedic surgeon. In Obtwega's area, he himself was the only available medically-trained person.

His church was appealing to AIM-AIR to airlift him to the Kijabe Medical Center in Kenya for the necessary orthopedic surgery, and treatment of his other wounds. Neither he nor they had any money to offer for re-imbursement of expenses.

The central theme of life in sub-Saharan Africa is, abundance of need and scarcity of resources. It's no different for AIM-AIR than for anyone else. They could not possibly hope to save every life in East and Central Africa that needs saving in ways like this, so the stewards of the scarce resources are routinely faced with agonizing triage decisions about when to say "no", in order to be able to continue to say "yes" as often as possible.

I listened to Andy Keller and Matt Olson discussing this one, late Monday night upon receiving the appeal. Matt decided he was willing to commit AIM-AIR resources to responding positively to this request, without knowing whether or when any money would become available to pay for the costs. It would require cancelling our planned flight to Masai territory today. Matt asked if that was alright with me. I said, of course, and offered to help with the rescue flight in any way possible. A plan was made in which Ron Pontier, who lives at Entebbe, Uganda, and has an AIM-AIR 206 there, would pick up the patient in Arua and bring him to Entebbe, while Matt and I would fly to Entebbe from Nairobi, in order to pick him up and bring him the rest of the way to Kenya.

Many flight requests, like this one, are requests for service of a "one-way" nature: someone needs either to be picked up, or dropped off. Such a request by itself creates an empty leg, but at AIM-AIR such legs rarely stay empty. There is almost always something or someone ready to take advantage of any flight to or from anywhere. This case was no different.

Yesterday, the DC-3..



..flown by Brian Stoltzfus, made an extensive tour with multiple stops in Sudan and Uganda (including Entebbe) before returning to Nairobi. It carried a lot of stuff, but would probably have had room for more, and it turned out that there were things here that Ron needed in Entebbe, which were left off the DC-3 by an oversight. This kind of thing used to happen to Jennilu and I all the time while we were living in the C.A.R., entirely dependent on Nairobi for logistical support. Space on a flight to CAR was one of the most precious of all our scarce resources, and to see it wasted was agonizing. This apparently happens much less frequently now, but of course there will always be some mistakes. And there will often be opportunities to make up for them, as in this case where we suddenly and unexpectedly had an airplane about to fly from Nairobi to Entebbe empty. Checking for anything that might need to go, we found all this:



It includes aircraft engine oil, oil filters, a spare tire, empty jerry cans, aircraft parts, and about a cubic yard of mail. This mail is not all for Ron and Donna, it's for missionaries and church workers throughout Uganda, eastern Congo, and C.A.R., for which the best chance or the only chance of delivery might be for it to be carried on one of Ron's flights. So we stuffed it all into the 210, strapped it down, and took off. Departing Wilson Airport on runway 14, we passed over herds of zebra and gazelle grazing just on the other side of the airport perimeter fence.

Flying over the northeast corner of Lake Victoria we saw dozens of small or medium sized islands in the lake inhabited by fishermen living in small villages.



This is a really big lake. Flying several miles away from any shoreline looks like flying over the ocean: there is sometimes no land visible in any direction out there. All these islands are destinations that are now within AIM-AIR's reach thanks to the availability since last winter of the floatplane.

We used runway 35 at Entebbe. The approach is over the water, and the runway threshold, right on the shoreline, is a long way away from the tower. This was the approach used by the Israelis, at night and without lights, for their 1976 rescue of hostages held in the terminal building. Today there was a cloud of lake flies also using that approach, but we were faster than them, and they splattered all over the wings and the windshield.

A while later Ron showed up in his 206 with Obtwega.



Matt had asked me to try to find a wheelchair. In the course of this task I noticed that the airport staff seemed reluctant to converse with me in Swahili, even though they clearly understood it, but I did manage to get a wheelchair.

Ron spoke bilingually to Obtwega in Swahili and Lingala (a widely-used intertribal language in Congo). He also gave me an explanation about the non-use of Swahili.
"Swahili is out of fashion here these days."
"Why?"
"For some reason, people associate it with the Idi Amin era."
So by using it at Entebbe I had been demonstrating myself to be a relic of that era - even though I was of course no fan of Mr. Amin's.
"So, what do you use now?"
"I'm learning Luganda."
"Is it like other languages?"
"No, it's completely different. There is no vocabulary overlap at all with anything else I know."
Ron speaks French and Lingala (for Congo), Zande and Sango (for C.A.R.), Arabic (for Sudan), Swahili (for East Africa), and a couple of others.

Obtwega had no objection to Swahili. I asked him how his injuries had happened. He said that, in the middle of the night, soldiers had come banging on the door of his house. He asked what they wanted. They said, money. He said he had none. They broke in anyway, shot him, and took everything from his house, including the furniture and the bed. Apparently the only reason for their attack was that there is now in eastern Congo no governing authority willing or able to prevent them from doing so as they please. This is a consequence of rebellion and counterrebellion continuing and disintegrating into lawless chaos featuring unrestrained rampages by any and all militia groups that can buy or steal guns and ammunition. The same kind of thing has also been happening recently in Somalia.

Facing a need for international travel, Obtwega had no passport. Even if there were a clear answer to the question of which government has authority over him -which there isn't - it would have been logistically impossible for him to get one. Fortunately there are local ways of dealling with situations like this, which come up routinely. Local officials, on their own authority, generate letters that are called, in French-speaking Africa, "laissez-passers" which state that the named bearer is known to the official, and is a resident and citizen of his own country. These are generally accepted in lieu of passports throughout central Africa, and are stamped and signed by receiving authorities in lieu of visas, but are less common in East Africa. Obtwega's wife and child had only a hand-written addendum on his laissez-passer, saying "accompanied by a woman and a child". This seemed a bit thin to us, but it was found acceptable by Ugandan authorities for transit through Uganda, and by Kenya authorities for entry into Kenya. Probably, Obtwega's blood-soaked bandages were more compelling than any paperwork. However that detail introduced questions of its own. The Kenyan immigration officer asked, "Was he a combatant in the Congo conflict?" We assured him that he was not.

The people of Congo seem to me to be incredibly tough and tolerant of suffering. A patient in Obtwega's condition by all rights ought to be transported on a stretcher with his injured limbs supported by splints. But all we could offer was a small, ordinary upright seat in the 210, into which Obtwega had to be lifted. Although his pain while being moved was clearly excruciating, he never uttered a sound or a complaint. Even when seated comfortably, there was pain visible around the edges of his eyes, but no complaints. His wife appeared greatly relieved to be on the way to help and safety, and a friend he had brought along to help him move appeared concerned.



These folks were about to become destitute foreigners in a strange country. Matt asked them whether they had any money at all, even though we really already knew the answer. They had nothing. Matt called Andy in Nairobi on the HF radio and told him to withdraw the equivalent of $150.00 in Kenya shillings from AIM-AIR's account, to be added to the bill which might never be paid, and handed to Obtwega so that he would not arrive at Kijabe totally destitute. Only just now while writing this, have I noticed the various points of analogy between Matt's job today and the parable of the Good Samaritan as told by Jesus. Good job, Matt. I'm confident that under your management, and "in spite of" your generosity, AIM-AIR is not going to go broke.

After persuading Kenya immigration officials at Wilson airport to admit Obtwega into Kenya rather than detain him or send him back, we transfered him to a van for a ride to Kijabe. As Michael Steeves pointed out, the airstrip up there is marginal, really suitable only for a lightly-loaded 206, and even then the landing is a very rough ride. Obtwega needed to go by road from Nairobi to Kijabe. After the transfer to the van our part of the rescue was complete.



I had time left in the day to shower, change, pack, and go out for Chinese food at the Hong Kong with Jim and Bev Streit before catching the evening British Airways 747 to London, on the way to PA, wondering when I'll next have an opportunity to come "home" (according to the sign in the hangar). Posted by Barry at December 23, 2003 07:58 PM