The emergency call from our boss came on our second night on the road. With two colleagues, I was in the middle of a 20-hour road trip from Juba to Yambio, a muddy pothole roller coaster ride. With an uncooperative satellite phone, the only thing we could make out of our boss’s message was Yambio, motorcycle, medevac. We were to learn the full terrible story later. A speeding motorcyclist slammed into the side of one of our vehicles as it exited our work compound. Though our vehicle was barely moving, the hook on the front of the vehicle’s winch had somehow hooked onto the motorcycle, pulling it underneath the vehicle. The driver was badly injured – blood squirting from his mangled leg. His female passenger was lying nearby, having been thrown from the bike.The next hours were a confusion of police dealings, family negotiations, phone and radio calls. The young man was rushed to the hospital and prepped for surgery, in and of itself not the best option in an ill-equipped developing country hospital. The family, however, refused the operation. They wanted us to medevac him to a better hospital – to a hospital that was operated by us (the Yambio hospital does not fall under our command). To the casual onlooker, it would appear that we could easily meet such a demand. We are a medical organization, it’s true, but we do not have a doctor on staff in Yambio (all our care in the village clinics is primary health care, rendered by minimally trained community health workers and maternal child health workers). And we certainly don’t have an airplane on standby. Try explaining this to a family that only sees an organization with vehicles, satellite phones, handheld, radios and two compounds, and one whose staff is frequently boarding UN flights to other destinations for R&R. It was feared that the community might revolt against us, accusing us of having run over the motorcyclist. Hence, the call from our boss, warning that if the situation worsened we would not be allowed to continue on to Yambio.
In the end, with much difficulty, a UN airplane was secured and the patient was flown hundreds of miles to our hospital in the neighboring state. The motorcyclist’s leg was amputated. There was no way to save it.
Our vehicle has been impounded for an indefinite period of time by the police who subsequently took it on a “road test” without our presence and demanded $50 for doing so. Again, this may not seem to be an inconvenience, but without enough vehicles it is nearly impossible to deliver drugs to our clinics, to make site support supervision visits and conduct on-the-job trainings, and to continue refurbishing modest clinics in remote underserved locations.
Worse yet, Victor, our driver, has been incarcerated in prison. It was more for his safety than anything else, but the truth be told he cannot be freed until the young man whose leg was amputated returns. This could be months. Once the motorcyclist’s leg heals, he will be taken to the International Committee of the Red Cross in Juba for prosthesis.
In the end, though we were not at fault, we will likely be ordered to pay thousands of dollars to the motorcyclist’s family. Another NGO in Yambio, who shall go unmentioned, recently was ordered to pay $10,000 to the family of a man that their driver hit and killed. And considering we just received word this week that lay-offs are in the works for ex-pat and national staff alike due to funding problems, this is not being taken lightly.
My introduction to Victor came in the prison yard. As he works in our Tambura site, located some 12 hours away, I had never met him. Wearing a DARE T-shirt from Coon Rapids, Minnesota, this 26-year-old who appeared no older than 19, was downtrodden. He subverted his eyes as he shook my hand and then followed the guard’s orders to sit on the concrete step of the administration building. Milton and I were ordered to take a chair nearby, allowing us to converse, but not to touch. Our visit would be monitored by the nice guards with their guns and bayonets. We were relieved to learn that Victor had resumed eating, which he refused to do for the first few days of his incarceration. His first wife had come down from Tambura in order to visit him daily, no doubt improving his spirits. And we had brought him a sleeping mat and a blanket so that he could put something between his body and the cold prison floor.
So, now we wait. We wait for the young man whose leg was amputated to return to Yambio. We wait for our vehicle to be released from impound. We wait for Victor to be released from prison. And we wait for judgment.
**Photo explanation: This picture is the true depiction of Victor. He took it upon himself to give attention to this small boy who had been abandoned by his mother in Tambura. Obi is now being cared for by his uncle in a neighboring community, but Victor remains Obi's beloved "uncle."
