I managed to spend all Monday in Rwanda, stuck as the piggy in the middle between the local medical team and the patient on one side, the parents and the insurance company on the other side. It was a convoluted drawn out affair that is still ongoing as I write. I obviously can go into no details but I learnt a great deal about African medical rivalries and politics. I also learnt a huge amount about medical travel insurance. All I will say is this - read your policy carefully. Depending on the very particular wording of your policy will depend on where you can be transferred to. There is a big difference between paying to repatriate you once you have been treated where you are (have a think about what that might entail i.e. where are you going?) and paying to air ambulance transfer by private jet to whatever country you desire. A lot of people will be under the impression that if they get sick/injured they will just get a medevac back home. Not necessarily I'm afraid...
To cut a long story short, Morris and I spent 14 hours in Kigali waiting for a final decision and were eventually pulled out as the costs of having the pilots and the plane just sitting there at the airport was escalating beyond reasonable. We lost our ambulance and so had to get a pick up to take us back to the airport and then check in all our medical equipment through standard airport security. Explaining to the Rwandan airport security (both sets of them! - how exactly anyone is supposed to be able to generate any dangerous or illegal materials in the 250m between the two checks is beyond me) that we had delicate medical equipment that might damage the X-ray machine or explode was rather tricky. Note to self - don't make the universal sign language for explosion at Rwandan airport security again. Or tell them you have drugs.
Two hours getting grilled in Kigali International Airport and we were free to go air-side. We had to carry all the stuff to a crowded shuttle bus, squeeze on and got driven from plane to plane until he made a detour for us to where the jet with the two very bored looking pilots Peter and Rob were distinctly unimpressed. I was also to learn that I missed a charity case evacuation of a 2 day old child with sepsis and a complex congenital colo-vesical abnormality. So not one of us was in a great mood.
The day did, however, have some positive aspects. I did get a good chance to get driven around Kigali which is a beautiful city if you ever get the chance to visit. Lush green hills, well made buildings along the hills and valleys, the roads and landscaping are immaculate. In fact there was hardly any refuse to see. Apparently the president of Rwanda has banned plastic bags. An interesting initiative, and as Peter the pilot said, "They don't have the Nairobi flower here." The Nairobi flower is the common site of a black thin plastic bag stuck flapping on a post or a wire. There were billboards up with interesting slogans such as 'CORRUPTION. It demeans us all. Sweep it away." It was a surprise to feel so safe and so impressed with a city that so recently was the site of so much horror.
There is a memorial museum about the genocide and the pilots told me it is difficult not to leave in tears. The biggest question people always leave with is 'How?' How can such extraordinary numbers of good people do such horrendous things to each other? From Milgram's electroshock experiment to Zimbardo's prison experiment, as unpalatable as they are, we know that unfortunately we all have such potential. It doesn't seem to take long or much prodding to influence it out of us either. As we waited by the plane and mused on the issues of moral relativism and the collective intentionality of something as horrific as genocide, I think I said something stupid like "Hopefully we can all learn from such events to stop them from happening again." to which one of the pilots said, "You mean like in Syria just last week." "Oh yeah." We stood there in silence for a bit, looking out across the mist rolling into the surrounding valleys of Kigali and then we flew back to Nairobi.
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