I flew a plane!

Flying Medical Service is a volunteer group of pilots that flies all around East Africa, usually to transfer unstable patients to larger hospitals. The medical staff is also volunteer, so yesterday they asked me to come along on a flight to Dar es Salaam. It was awesome.

The plane is a little single engine Cessna:

Above, I'm sitting on the stretcher for the patient...the doctor sits in the seat you see next to the stretcher. It's a pretty tight fit!

On the flight to Dar es Salaam, I played doctor, keeping the patient stable (with oxygen, medications, comforting words) for the 2.5 hour flight. On the way back, though...I got to play PILOT! With the patient safely transferred to Dar, the real pilot let me fly for 2 hours on our way home to Arusha, and also let me do a take-off all by myself. It was thrilling, and definitely whet my appetite for flying. P.s. it was also totally illegal...no rules in Africa I guess! We flew over Zanzibar Island, lots of cool river beds, craters/calderas, and actually flew right past Mt. Kilimanjaro:

Pretty spectacular.

The pilot, Pat, had some incredible stories from his past flights, too. He is from Detroit but has lived in Tanzania for 35 years. He has witnessed some pretty unbelievable things. For example, Pat described being the first civilian plane allowed to land in Kigali when the war in Rwanda broke out in 1994; apparently he was given clearance so he could evacuate American doctors that were trapped there. Once he got there, though, the doctors and he set up a refugee camp just across the border in Tanzania - long story short, what started as a day trip to Nairobi turned into over two weeks manning this refugee camp. He told me that the next time I come on a flight with him, I should be prepared for anything!