| Whether you’re a real estate agent making money hand over fist in a booming housing market, or an employee of a mega-million dollar warehouse chain mindlessly stocking shelves in the wee hours of the morning, everyone eventually has the urge to escape. For aviation enthusiast and Canadian businessman Scott Griffin, it meant flying his Cessna 180 solo across the Atlantic to Africa in order to work with the Flying Doctors Service, a division of the African Medical and Research Foundation.
My Heart is Africa recalls the time he and his wife spent in Africa, and is part history, cultural lesson, love story and motivational speech – the latter being what Griffin truly wants the readers to take away with them.
"All of us at some point in our career want to pick up and try something new. But it’s not easy to do," he says. "We all have responsibilities and we’re not sure how we would reintegrate ourselves back into our daily lives on return. But if you do it, it’s enormously rewarding."
Rewarding seems too small a word to describe the results of Griffin’s journey through the mysterious and often misunderstood continent. Initially, his purpose in Africa was to restructure and streamline certain aspects of the Flying Doctors Service, and although these business details are scattered throughout the book, along the way the focus changes to a more personal experience for both Griffin and his wife.
Through an amazing assortment of adventures, the true meaning of their time in Africa becomes clear. From befriending a general in the middle of a war zone, to gaining the confidence of their captors while imprisoned in Tanzania, the lives and character of Africa’s people rises above the paragraphs and words.
"The thing that strikes you repeatedly about Africa is the wonderful sense of humanity and that the interaction between people is so important – much more important than the transaction," Griffin says. "It’s such a huge part of the continent and it’s encouraging."
Accordingly, within the book Griffin shows the reader these not-so-exceptional elements of the continent – self-serving government officials, poverty-ravaged slums and a society still under the umbrella of an outdated ideology of pleasing the "big man," whether it’s a tribal chief, a warlord or a powerful and corrupt politician. For the reader, all of these things are experienced first hand through the eyes of these travellers, who used their ability to fly to all corners of the continent to gain a greater view of Africa than the average tourist ever could.
Of course, with all the time spent in the cockpit of the plane, it is inevitable that the details and the tricks of the flying trade make their way into a majority of the book’s tales.
"The trick here was to put in enough (but) not make it so technical that people say, ‘oh, this is not for me, this is only for flyers,’" says Griffin. "At the same time, I felt it was important to try and get people into the cockpit and experience the same thing I did."
Although initially daunting, and a bit overwhelming to the non-flyer, it’s evident that becoming familiar with all these subtle points of flying does in fact help to draw the reader deeper into the situations and events that etched such substantial new meaning into Griffin’s life.
And with the retelling of these events as part of his personal journey over the course of those two years, Griffin has been able to clarify for himself and the reader the feelings of his own heart and what he desires others to see more clearly than ever – the path that we as a society need to be taking.
"I want people to see what a magnificent continent it is," says Griffin. "And also that we have a moral obligation to help Africa in its agony, because all our antecedents have sprung from it. To ignore this is really to deny our past, our very existence.
"We always think we have lessons to teach Africa, but we have lessons to learn from it." |
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