This essay can be found on the Whitecoat Investor Blog.
Malaria check negative!
I was always going to travel. I’ve known this since I was in fifth grade, when as an exchange student, my French “mom” shoved a few francs into my hand and dispatched me, a kid from the North side of Chicago, into the streets of Paris for bread. The urge for adventure never left me.
I put on the white t-shirt with MSF in red letters and flew from Paris to Kampala to Juba. I disembarked and the most unusual thing happened: nobody noticed me. There were no touts, nobody selling, and nobody asking for anything.
The next day, I flew to Wau and finally to my village, Aweil, about a hundred clicks south of Darfur. We landed a sketchy twin prop onto a patch of red dirt. The heat was a kick in the groin, like summer in Phoenix, but humid. I sweated buckets and looked around—no airport—just dirt—in every direction. I wanted to ask the pilot to take me home, but six flights in as many days was wretched enough. Besides, I didn’t speak Arabic.
A land-cruiser with an MSF flag appeared, as if by magic, to fetch me. We drove past fields with straw and mud huts and reached a compound surrounded by stone and barbed wire. I went into a non-ventilated stand up latrine and dry-heaved. Then, before even setting down a bag, Nancy, the medical director, asked me to go straight to the hospital and do cases.
“Now?”
“Yes, now,” she said.
“I haven’t eaten. I haven’t slept.”
“After lunch, then.”
Read the full essay on the Whitecoat Investor Blog.
