I never met Dr. Wouter Nolet. The 90 minute drive into the African bush, to visit Masanga Hospital, was not pleasant. My colleague, a plastic surgeon from Ireland, had arranged for the four of us to make the journey in the back of a small ambulance, as the Land Rover, owned by the Holy Spirit …
To the best of my recollection, I can’t recall ever being tear-gassed. My first instinct should have been to turn around and run away from the plaza, like everyone else, screaming and covering their mouths. The old, indigenous woman, with the multiple petticoats and black pork pie hat, sitting at her usual location half-way up …
“It is Free. It costs nothing,” stated the anesthesiologist to the boy’s family. “To put your son to sleep for his surgery costs absolutely nothing! It is Free! Free! But to wake him up?…very very expensive!” Indeed. Moments earlier, in the same pre-operative area in this public hospital in a large Central American city, I …