EVACUATION AIR
21 December 2018 Nyankunde, Democratic Republic of the Congo
Nyankunde is far too beautiful a town for the atrocities humans have committed in it. Surrounded by savannah, it sits lush and pastoral under a clutch of hills that look like green knuckles. It is a hospital town, known throughout the country for both its Congolese and international specialists. It was also a hospital town back in 2002, when a militia supported by a displaced tribe that had not been allowed to use the hospital raced down from the top of the hill and murdered roughly 3 000 civilians. Many of them were doctors and patients, and this incident became the single largest day of death in the Second Congo War, a nine-country conflagration that lasted from 1998 to 2003. As the violence seethed, the bricks of the hospital came down. Many of the buildings became roofless husks, toothless mouths, ruins. And even then, Nyankunde was a beautiful town.
By 2004, the hospital had returned. It now has several new buildings and new medical equipment provided by humanitarian organisations such as Samaritan’s Purse. It is staffed by doctors such as Patrick LaRochelle, who first visited the Congo shortly before he started medical school, heard about the massacre, and thought to himself: I never, ever want to live in the Congo. But LaRochelle and his wife are good people, religious people, who felt called by God to practise medicine in an underserved community. LaRochelle’s wife is a nurse practitioner who grew up doing humanitarian work in Haiti. After LaRochelle completed his residency, they applied to a project with World Medical Mission, part of Samaritan’s Purse, which listed the hospital in Nyankunde as a top option. They thought and prayed and asked friends for advice, and, well, here they are.
LaRochelle – sinewy, bespectacled, unassuming – was leaving the hospital for the day when a maternity nurse told him a woman had just been transferred from the maternity ward to the intensive care unit and was having trouble breathing. Because of an Ebola outbreak that had started in the nearby province of North Kivu in August, LaRochelle was supposed to wear gloves with every patient. The hospital had received shipments of thermometers and protective clothing and were paying screeners to monitor the entrances, where they kept bottles of bleach just in case. But LaRochelle was about to leave on his
