Memoir Reading Blog #5

Now confined to Wolfgang's lodge by a barrack of soldiers using the lodge as their base of operations, Scott and Krystyne meet Serge Petillon, a French photographer on a three-month photographic assignment in Kenya for a travel organization. The three quickly become friends, and soon convince the soldiers to allow them to leave the lodge in Serge's battered white Suzuki. Eventually, Serge drops Scott and Krystyne off at Maralal, a small village several hundred miles North of Nairobi, where Serge departs. Scott and Krystyne are then picked up by the Flying Doctors Service and flown back to Nairobi. Scott immediately sets about trying to recover his plane, despite the discouragement of the other pilots. After seemingly exhausting every single possibility of getting his plane off South Island, a young Aircraft Master Engineer named Denis Neylan contacts Scott and volunteers to camp out on the island with two other engineers and repair Scott's plane until it is flyable again. After four days, Denis finally finishes repairing the plane and Scott flies down with Colin Davies to inspect it. Colin goes over the newly repaired plane and brutally assesses that it is not ready to fly. The plane is taken apart and repaired again and is finally deemed safe for flight. Amazingly, Scott manages to take off and land the plane back in Nairobi, thus saving his plane from becoming scrap metal. This section of the novel also elaborates on Scott and Krystyne's experiences in Nairobi. During their two-year stay in Nairobi, Scott and Krystyne explored nearly every part of Nairobi, even the parts that are normally avoided by tourists. As a result, they made many lifelong friends from all parts of Kenyan society.

In this section it is clear that the Flying Doctors Service staff have influenced Scott's life in a drastic way. As Scott himself admits,

"The staff was passionate about their mission, with a vocation that went beyond making money for themselves or shareholders. Their attitude had an effect on me over the course of our two years in Kenya and, as a result, I underwent a transformation, a re-ordering of my personal goals. I formed insights on the subject of aid for underdeveloped countries, how it should be administered, and by whom."

The subject of aid is a tricky one in underdeveloped countries. Many aid organizations pour millions of dollars into their operations, but their solutions are only short-term and wasteful. Many aid organizations also provide lavish living quarters for their employees, alienating the aid workers and giving them a false sense of superiority. I disagree with these practices and think that these are all valid points. Aid work should not be about glamorous lifestyle or short-term solutions. The purpose of aid work is to provide long-term, sustainable, and acheivable goals in order to stabilize and develop underdeveloped countries. I think that people like the employees of the Flying Doctors Service have the right idea. They unselfishly risk their lives to provide aid to people who would likely never get any other form of help. Their example is one that should be followed by other aid organizations with significantly larger budgets. If these larger organizations administered aid in the same fashion that the Flying Doctors Service did, then Africa would be a very different place.