Gary Clayton of the Mission Aviation Fellowship writes: For more than 75 years, MAF’s fleet of light aircraft has been flying patients from some of the world’s most hard-to-access areas to hospital.
Many MAF flights involve women facing pregnancy complications, accident victims or people wounded due to tribal conflict. Two, less typical, MAF medevacs involved a two-week-old chimpanzee and a ten-year-old boy.
Both the chimp and the child had fallen from trees – the former in Liberia, the latter in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
When Mark fell from a tree in PNG, he broke his leg badly above the knee. Having suffered excruciating pain for over a week, Mark’s need for medical assistance was urgently relayed to MAF.
Pilots Philipp Sutter and Joseph Tua were in Mougulu when they received the call – 40 nautical miles from Mark’s remote jungle village in Wawoi Falls.
With favourable weather conditions and enough fuel for an additional hour of flying, they set off for Wawoi to collect Mark and his worried father. As soon as they landed, a large group of villagers helped the young patient onto the plane – Mark’s father holding his leg gently to ease the pain.
After a smooth and uneventful flight, they touched down in the small port town of Kiunga and Philipp and Joseph carried Mark to the Land Cruiser that was waiting to take him to hospital. ‘God,’ Philipp later concluded, ‘was in it all.’
Flying Mary to Monrovia
In Liberia, however, a very different kind of ‘medevac’ saw MAF airlifting a baby chimpanzee which, like Mark, had fallen from a tree. A week after the chimp was born in Sapo National Park, poachers shot its mother – baby Mary falling out of the tree when they killed her mum.
When a park ranger heard gunshots, he rushed to the scene, wrapped the tiny distraught chimp in a blanket and drove her to a global conservation group.
The organisation, which saw that Mary was barely clinging to life, contacted Jenny Desmond, founder of a chimpanzee rescue sanctuary near Monrovia.
But how, when the 211-mile dirt road between Greenville and Monrovia was now flooded due to the rainy season, could the injured chimp reach sanctuary safely?
The answer was again MAF – with Pilot Andrew Mumford flying Mary to Monrovia.
‘We’re so grateful for all the people who made this happen,’ said Jenny Desmond. ‘Baby Mary is doing really well. We’re just praying for the day when she can go to the Hundred Acre Wood and play in the forest.’
