Sections:
Books, My Heart is Africa: A Flying Adventure
Scott Griffin's My Heart is Africa: A Flying Adventure. This is the travel memoir of a successful Canadian businessman and certified pilot who volunteers for the Kenyan Flying Doctors Service for several years beginning in 1996, not to serve as one of their dedicated pilots, who fly the ill and injured out of remote areas, but as a business consultant. In the 1990s, the service faced challenges to its growth into a stable self-sustaining organization. The book is more about, as its title reflects, a flying adventure and not about the Flying Doctors. We learn about the considerable problems facing the charity, but at the book’s end we remain assured that the Flying Doctors service is a noble cause and that should any of us become ill or injured while in East Africa (anyone on safari should purchase short term Flying Doctors memberships) then these are the men and women who we most want to come to our rescue. Instead, author Griffin relates his flying adventures around Africa during his two-year Kenyan tenure. I learned more about the risks of small planes than is good for me. What the title also acknowledges is that this is another love story about Africa and the lessons it holds. The most powerful chapter for me, the one which most illustrates the Africa I know, care about and respect, is Chapter Five, Angels of Mercy: nurse Rose, compassionate and uncomplaining, flies in bad weather with a daring young pilot on an ill-fated rescue mission of a fifteen-year-old tribal girl who hemorrhages after giving birth to a stillborn child, while her own young son lies desperately ill and in need of better health care in a Nairobi hospital.
28-05-2007
