Emergency Medical Evacuation

While we are learning Portuguese, we won’t be involved much in the flying ministry of MAF.  An MAF pilot doesn’t just fly airplanes.  If we are going to be tools of God to share the love of Jesus Christ, we must be able to communicate His love clearly…and that means learning new vocabulary, how to construct sentences, figuring out how to conjugate verbs correctly, etc.  

Our language tutor, Alberto with us during a lesson

That being said, one day Dave happened to be at the hangar when a call came in for an emergency medical evacuation and he got the opportunity to ride along.  A man who works at a titanium mine about 1 hour away (by air) had an extreme case of malaria and had gone too long without treatment.  MAF was called to come pick him up and transport him to the hospital in Nampula, where we are based. To make the trip by road, it would have taken many bumpy hours for him to get to Nampula.  

Patient being loaded onto the plane at the mine

 When the MAF plane landed at the airstrip associated with the mine, there was already an ambulance waiting.  The ambulance drove up to the plane and Dave and Dave L. (the other MAF pilot) pulled out seats to accommodate the stretcher the man was lying on.  The patient was already unconscious and was hooked up to an IV when MAF arrived.  It took about five or six people to delicately lift the stretcher into the plane where he could lay comfortably.  A Mozambican doctor sat in the seat next to the stretcher to monitor him on the flight and with that they took off and headed back to Nampula. At one point during the flight, the doctor seemed concerned about the patient and pulled out an oxygen bottle and rigged up a mask, however, when he went to open the valve, it could be heard hissing even over the noise of the airplane.  Concerned that the bottle was leaking oxygen into the cabin, Dave L. asked Dave to communicate to the doctor the dangers of the leaking bottle in the plane (without Portuguese, he had to use hand gestures).  After several attempts to fix it, the doctor was able to use it without it leaking. 

Arrangements had been made for an ambulance to be waiting at the airport when they arrived.  While in flight, Dave L. radioed the airport to make sure they knew to expect the ambulance to meet the plane.  After landing, the plane was parked at a far corner away from any other airport traffic, however, the ambulance wasn’t there.  Instead security came up to the plane and they learned that the ambulance was waiting outside the fence because no one had paid a fee to access the airport.  Dave L. tried to explain that the ambulance was needed immediately and that the fee could be paid once the patient was taken care of.  However, security insisted the fee be paid, so Dave L. had to go into the airport and pay the it himself in order to get the ambulance to the plane.  While he was gone, the doctor demanded that they let the ambulance in.  Seeing that someone had gone to pay the fee, security at last allowed it in.  

Patient being unloaded at Nampula

 Once the ambulance pulled up, Dave, the doctor, and the ambulance workers quickly worked to unload the patient off the plane and he was quickly taken to the hospital.  Afterwards, Dave L. took a moment to give a lesson in compassion, asking the security if they would they want the ambulance delayed until a fee was paid if it was them or a family member that had the emergency.

We never found out if the man recovered, however, it is most certain, that without the airplane, he would not have received medical treatment in time and likely would have died.