AN AFRICAN EVANGELIST RAISED FROM THE DEAD
I always appreciate it when fellow pilots share their stories for me to publish. Although it’s been a while since I’ve seen him, I still consider Andy Briggs a good friend as well as an excellent pilot that I had the opportunity to fly with during our time together at ABX Air. WB
AN AFRICAN EVANGELIST GETS RAISED FROM THE DEAD
by Andy Briggs
This is a favorite recollection of my time serving with Mission Aviation
Fellowship in Nebobongo, Zaire (DR Congo).
The memory extends over several months and 3 flights:
We got an emergency call on the HF radio one morning that someone in
Malinguia needed to be evacuated to Nebobongo due to a medical condition.
After an hour flight to the west, I picked up the patient, a well-loved but very
sick elderly evangelist. Much of the village showed up to see him off and
there were many tears of sadness, anticipating that they might never see him
again. His wife was asking the local missionary if I would bring her
husband’s body back after he died. I could make no such promise. I brought
the man to Nebobongo and delivered him to the care of the medical staff
there who diagnosed the problem as an intestinal blockage. However, our tiny
bush hospital did not have the technology to determine where the blockage
was located. They did what they could to solve the problem, but to no avail.
The next day, I was asked to transfer the patient to Nyankunde, an hour and a
half to the east, where the patient might be better served. The man was still
able to stand feebly and sit, albeit in constant gut pain. So I loaded him into
one of the back seats and took off for the 10 min. flight to Isiro where I
needed to pick up a few more passengers before heading east.
Just before landing at Isiro, the cabin filled with the most obnoxious odor and
I feared the worst...someone projectile vomited or had diarrhea?? After
landing, I got out and went around to the rear door of the Cessna 206 and saw
a look of helpless mortification on the evangelist’s face. His shirt and his seat
were a mess but I had trouble sorting out what happened because he spoke
Bangala and I spoke Swahili. With the help of other passengers, we unloaded
him onto the macadam ramp so we could start the clean-up. Some Bangala
speakers who spoke French helped me to piece together what happened: the
Nebobongo hospital staff, in an effort to relieve his pain, gave the elderly
gentleman an ileostomy and flushed out his stomach and small intestine. The
hospital was low on supplies and did not have even surgical tape, let alone
ostomy bags to collect any waste. They could have sutured him up again, but
instead, they put a small gauze pad over his abdominal wound and held it in
place with a couple pieces of scotch tape. So when the uninformed evangelist
was offered breakfast by his host right before boarding the plane, the partially
digested food showed up at the ostomy site 30 minutes later and no scotch
tape was going to restrain it.
I was pretty miserable, cleaning up green stinky goo from my airplane,
thinking, “I could be standing at the top of an airstair, welcoming my
passengers onto a corporate jet or an airliner, but here I am sweating in the
middle of steamy central Africa, smelling like poop up to my elbows.” My
sour mood quickly turned to pity for the old evangelist who was much more
miserable than I, sitting half-naked on the tarmac with a leaking hole in his
side, getting cleaned up by strangers. I found my roll of duct tape and a 4”
gauze pad from my first aid kit and made sure nothing else was going to
escape from the stoma for the next couple hours. Not long after that, we
landed in Nyankunde and I delivered the patient to the care of the mission
hospital staff there.
In the following busy weeks, I had little occasion to think of the evangelist
until we got a radio message that he was ready to return home. Perhaps a
month had passed since I had first picked him up and I was a bit surprised
that he had survived, let alone healed well enough to return to his “bush
village” home. When he saw me, his strong embrace and ear to ear smile
communicated more than any words could and he happily sat in the seat next
to me for the return trip to Malinguia. When we arrived, the people meeting
the plane filled the grass airstrip, whooping, dancing and singing praises to
God. It was like my passenger had been raised from the dead—and the Lord
privileged me to witness it and play a small part in his resurrection!
Ironically, during the 22 years I have served as a corporate pilot, nothing
compares to the satisfaction of that day in 1987.