“I am going to soar over the open savannahs of the Maasai Mara like a flaming cartwheel of revenge with a Lycoming engine on fire. Marcel Romdane is my name, pilot from Germany,” I declared—arms flaring with the righteous fury of a televangelist high on jet fuel, dripping in purpose, delusion, and enough bravado to start a small war with a spork.
“And I will send elephant poachers screaming like nursing home residents mid-Bingo—when the fire alarm goes off, the WiFi dies, and someone turns off the oxygen.”
It was a strong opening statement. Bold. Heroic. All that was missing was me wearing a crucifix, a Templar helmet, and standing on a burning soapbox while a lion nodded solemnly behind me in moral approval. Slightly racist, potentially actionable, and, of course, completely unsupported by intelligence, strategy, or any trace of mental stability. Also—I should mention—I had absolutely no idea where the poachers were actually coming from.
Mental note: Google that before someone else quotes me on record. Preferably before Interpol shows up with zip ties and a tranquilliser dart.
Chris—possibly Christian, maybe Christoph, could’ve even been a rogue Christoffel (honestly, I wasn’t even sure)—blinked slowly.
He said nothing. He just stared at me with the quiet, paralysed horror of a man watching someone bite into a live wire while reciting My fair Lady dialogue in Arabic.
Was I deranged?
Was I armed?
Was this a hostage situation disguised as a pitch?
Possibly all three.
You see, Chris was the owner of Yellow Wings, a modest safari shuttle operation perched on the confused fringe of Wilson Airport—Nairobi’s chaotic aviation compost heap. A place where aviation rules went to drink, and bush pilots, airborne tourists, and semi-legal aircraft came to play aviation roulette. His office sat above the madness like a control tower designed by Salvador Dalí and furnished by IKEA’s “Regret & Dust” collection, circa 1998.
Inside: outdated safari brochures from the ’80s, enough dead flies to trigger a biblical plague, and a wheezing fan that had been gasping for help since the British left and forgot to unplug it. The air smelled like ambition that had been left in the sun too long—curdled into something bitter and quietly resentful.
I believe Chris was either Swiss or Austrian—though in Kenya, that distinction matters only if you’re at a cheese-tasting competition or trying to apologize for colonialism.
What truly mattered was that Chris wanted to be a Kenyan cowboy. Badly. He had the attitude. He had the weathered boots. He had the leathery tan and the kind of dehydrated squint that said, “I’ve personally wrestled a dik-dik and lost.”
And he was wearing the sacred four golden 747 stripes—sewn onto his shirt like he was about to command the Luftwaffe’s comeback tour or lead Kenya’s first manned space mission to Venus aboard a repurposed crop duster.
Those embroidered epaulettes that, in Africa, appear to be handed out like participation trophies to anyone who’s ever made a plane turn left on purpose. It had become a full-blown pandemic of delusion: from bush pilots to baggage handlers, bartenders to baristas—anyone who’d ever seen a runway was strutting around with epaulettes like they’d personally landed the Concorde on a fishing boat.
I’d seen the fuel guy wearing two.
I once saw a man sweeping the hangar floor wearing three stripes and a clipboard. By that metric, the air traffic controller’s dog was probably a certified flight instructor.
Chris leaned back in his chair—the kind that squeaked like it remembered the good years—and fixed me with a gaze sharpened by decades of surviving white-saviour PowerPoints and Dutch missionaries with drone footage.
A look that said:
I’ve heard it all—every deranged pitch from every wide-eyed expat who thinks aviation is just a matter of willpower and snacks. But this one… this one’s got flair. The kind that usually comes with sirens. Go on. Impress me.
And then, the inevitable question:
“How many hours? 2,000? 5,000? 10,000?”
I hesitated.
Shifted on my feet like a man who had just realised he stepped in something warm, wet, and freshly canine.
"Well,” I chirped, with the confidence of someone who makes horoscopes out of coffee grounds and cloud formations, “it’s almost fifty!"
Chris sat up.
Eyes wide. Mouth slightly open.
He looked like he was witnessing the resurrection of Amelia Earhart—materialising out of thin air to the sound of Hare Krishna chants and distant tambourines.
“Fifty thousand hours?!” he gasped.
I could feel my status skyrocketing—from flying ferret to full-blown Aviator of Doom.
But Chris wasn’t stopping there. His eyes widened like he’d just seen Elvis land a 747 on a tennis court.
“Mein Gott! What are you, a time traveler? Did you give the Wright brothers pointers? Have you been airborne so long your mailing address is FL390?! You must’ve flown over Midway, Korea, and Vietnam—hell, were you providing air support at Dunkirk?!”
For a moment, I wasn’t just a pilot. I was aviation’s answer to the Second Coming. Chris looked at me like I wasn’t just a man—But the mythical creature every Swiss pilot secretly prays to when turbulence hits:
The Patron Saint of Airspeed and Slightly Forged Logbooks.
I coughed.
"Eh… no… not quite,” I said, doing my best impression of a man who faked his own death and now finds himself centre stage at his own funeral—mid-eulogy—desperately trying to crawl out of the coffin without knocking over the flower arrangements or making eye contact with his sobbing aunt.
“It’s… it’s more like actual fifty. Like… five-zero. Like ‘one more than forty-nine.’ Total..”
Time stopped.
Like, physically ceased to exist. Reality flickered like a faulty fluorescent light. Even gravity seemed to let go in pure existential despair.
Chris didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Expression locked in place like a wax figure mid-stroke. His face froze in that same polite-yet-traumatised way usually reserved for people who just realised their new Tinder date brought their mother along.
You could hear the wind weeping outside.
The printer in the corner let out a soft beep and died.
The ceiling fan began spinning backwards out of protest.
Somewhere outside, a zebra keeled over from sheer secondhand shame.
And that’s when it happened—Chris looked me in the eyes, and I saw it. Not anger. Not disappointment. No, something worse.
Pity.
The kind of pity you give a man who genuinely believes in fortune cookie prophecies, swears veganism is the key to immortality, insists protein is a conspiracy because gorillas only eat leaves—and therefore Navy SEALs should too—and still thinks world peace is just one firm handshake away.
I quietly wondered what Chris would’ve said if he knew that even those fifty hours were a blatant exaggeration—massaged into existence by me generously adding every instruction hour I could scavenge—weather briefings and coffee breaks included—onto my fifteen actual hours of bouncing over cornfields and potato farms like a drunken mosquito.
**I made another mental note to—before presenting my logbook to the KCAA—include:
- all weather briefings with my instructor,
- any hours spent discussing airplanes since elementary school,
- every vacation flight taken in tourist class,
- and if that wasn’t enough, I could always pad the numbers with movies I’d seen on TV involving aircraft. **
If I played it right, I could probably squeeze in the opening credits of Top Gun, a Discovery Channel documentary on hot air balloons, and that one time I sat next to a retired pilot on a train. By the time I was done, my aviation history would read like a Spielberg script—based on hallucinations, poor judgment, and at least three active lawsuits. My logbook wouldn’t document flight hours; it would be a case study in delusion, legally admissible as evidence in at least two jurisdictions.
Flashback. A few days earlier.
“You’ve been in Nairobi two weeks already,” Shlomi said, sipping his coffee with the calm concern of someone watching a toddler try to stick a knitting needle into a power outlet.
“I expected at least two elephants rescued, three rhinos rehabilitated, one leopard in therapy, a bush clinic built, a grassroots NGO named after yourself… and maybe independence declared from Kenya. You’re behind schedule, my friend.”
Shlomi grinned at me with the wicked glee of an executioner offering you aspirin for your headache—right before pulling the lever and asking if you had any last requests involving jazz music.
I blinked.
Said nothing.
Tried to decide if he was joking, hallucinating, or genuinely expecting me to solve conservation, housing, and East African politics by Thursday—armed with nothing but misplaced confidence and a rental car that smelled like roasted despair.
And here’s the worst part: I started to doubt myself. Which, in my case, was dangerous. Because I had, in fact, accomplished more in two weeks than the combined output of three NGOs, five government departments, and a small village cursed with German paperwork. But Shlomi said it so casually—so cheerfully disappointed—that I genuinely started to wonder if I was slacking.
Maybe I should have airlifted an orphaned elephant by now. Or rebuilt a water system using discarded landing gear and sheer willpower. Instead, I was still running on half a pilot’s license, unverified optimism, and a to-do list that looked like a UN disaster response checklist printed in Comic Sans.
Which was… concerning. Because if Shlomi, of all people, thought I was moving too slow, then I was either operating on a completely different calendar—or three weeks late for a crash landing.
By African standards, I was doing great. By my own standards—delusional, cinematic, and modelled loosely after the life arc of Indiana Jones crossed with a caffeine-addicted border collie—I was spiralling into catastrophic delay.
Shlomi took pity. The same kind you give a man who just tried to iron his shirt with a waffle maker.
“Listen, Marcel,” he said, with the slow precision of someone lowering a lunatic into a padded room. “You need to talk to Gabby next door. She runs a safari outfit for weird tourists—mostly German-speaking types who think Jack Wolfskin jackets and photographer’s vests are mandatory for survival in the wild. She’s well-connected, understands your babbling far better than I do, and she might be able to point you to someone who can help you find an airstrip, a place to stay for your funny little airplane—if it ever arrives—a doctor for your aviation medical, and maybe one for the mental part too, just in case.”
He sipped his coffee, then added, almost as an afterthought:
“I believe she’s friends with some odd guy who runs a charter operation out of Wilson Airport. Met him once. Which was enough. If you, my friend, have an overinflated ego—he’s the airspace where God gets denied clearance.”
He squinted at me.
“…Still, he might be able to help out with a few of the other 100 things you wanted to accomplish this week. What was it again? Start an airline? Build a runway out of cardboard and prayer? Cure systemic corruption with a firm handshake and a wrench?”
I nodded solemnly.
“Something like that.”
This is how I found myself cheerfully grinning like a dog left unsupervised in a sausage shop—tail wagging, eyes dilated, and completely unaware that the butcher was about to call security—while sitting in Chris’s office asking for a few friendly hints about the intricacies of Kenyan aviation.
Shlomi was right.
Chris’s ego was immense.
Not metaphorically.
I mean physically massive—complete with its own gravitational field, a moon, and several emotionally neglected satellites orbiting in condescending silence and occasionally sending passive-aggressive telemetry.
But beggars can’t be choosers—and I needed his help. Gabby had told me that Chris was better connected than a Saudi prince at a World Economic Forum afterparty, and supposedly as benevolent as the Apostle Paul on Prozac. While I couldn’t verify the saintly compassion part, I had to admit: the man knew more useful people than a chain-smoking snitch in a noir villain montage.
Jonathan—the undead civil servant haunting the KCAA licensing department—had recently handed me a semi-comprehensive list of tasks I needed to complete before they’d even consider acknowledging my existence, let alone my license application.
- A written test.
- A Kenyan aviation medical—possibly administered by a local shaman, or a bone-through-the-nose medicine man named Voodoo who moonlighted as a witch doctor and part-time dentist.
- A confirmation from the German Luftwaffe or, more precisely, the Luftfahrtbundesamt—a federal hellhole where joy went to die sometime around 1973.
- Six pages—as a copy—of my flight logbook (which, minor detail, only had four at the time).
- Some sort of administrative fee (obviously).
- A pack of Marlboros for every living soul occupying that office—at least seven people, not counting the janitor who had declared squatter’s rights on the coffee machine zone.
- And several other “formalities” that could, depending on your moral compass, be solved with a small, untraceable bribe and a smile that said, “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
The written test was, somehow, miraculously ticked off.
The logbook? Well… it needed a bit of attention.
And by “attention,” I mean delicate massaging.
And by “massaging,” I mean wholesale numerical reinterpretation, timestamp origami, and aggressive timeline FengShui. A practice which, I would soon discover, wasn’t just tolerated in aviation—it was practically encouraged, especially when the rules were handcrafted by bureaucrats who couldn’t tell an airplane from a vending machine.
It’s a universal law: pressure must escape somewhere. And every senseless, arbitrary, mind-flattening regulation birthed by an aviation authority with zero cockpit experience inevitably creates a workaround, a loophole, or a full-blown black-market scheme involving carbon paper, fax machines, and a guy named Mustafa who knows a guy named Mustafa.
This isn’t a Third World phenomenon. It’s not even a Kenyan quirk. It’s global. Possibly even interstellar. Somewhere out there, on a distant alien moon, a three-eyed bush pilot is forging logbook hours to satisfy an intergalactic licensing clerk with seven heads, twelve clipboards, and a vendetta against joy.
I left Chris’s office shortly after—only after swearing on the life of his mother, his backup mother, and possibly a distant aunt—that I’d return pronto with a crate of beer for him and his merry band of aviation misfits. In return, I walked out clutching a doctor's name, the vague promise of an airstrip somewhere in the hills of Limuru, and a recommendation for a customs clearance “company”—which, as I’d soon discover, consisted of two clowns in ill-fitting suits operating out of what looked like a condemned bus stop.
There was just one tiny problem: I had completely, gloriously, and irreversibly forgotten to plan for any of it. In my cinematic hallucination of how this would go, I’d imagined myself casually strolling into Kenya’s heavily guarded customs zone, announcing, “I am Marcel Romdane”—yes, the Marcel Romdane—and walking out triumphantly with my aircraft in tow, possibly to slow applause and a patriotic soundtrack.
I hadn’t arranged anything.
No clearance.
No paperwork.
No transport.
Another minor oversight: I had no earthly clue how the shipping container was supposed to get to Wilson Airport—or anywhere, really.
Did I think it would taxi itself?
No matter.
There was no rush.
As of late January 2012, the vessel carrying my aircraft was still aimlessly drifting somewhere off the coast of Somalia, possibly being chased by pirates or mistaken for a floating casino.
First pit stop: the doctor’s office.
His name was Dr. Gatabaki.
And he was, in theory, everything I could’ve hoped for—an aviation-certified miracle worker hidden somewhere between rare competence and the cast of a low-budget medical sitcom where the syringe budget ran out after the pilot episode. He was the gatekeeper to my aviation medical. The man who could scribble a signature that would make the difference between me flying a Super Cub and being grounded like a 9-year-old who accidentally set fire to the hamster cage. But before I could bask in his hypothetical greatness, I had to overcome something far more menacing than heart murmurs or blood pressure:
I had to survive the jungle.
I’m not talking about the actual jungle.
I’m talking about something far more hostile:
Booking the Appointment.
Three innocent words A phrase that in civilised corners of the planet—say, Germany, Canada, or anywhere clipboards aren’t treated like Vatican heirlooms—simply means: pick up phone, speak to human, confirm time. Done. Not here. Not in Kenya.
Not in this dimension. Here, “booking the appointment” is less a task and more a descent into madness. A psychological expedition. A bureaucratic triathlon through low-bandwidth purgatory—staffed entirely by people who were cursed by a witch to suffer one long, unbroken Monday for eternity.
You start the day cheerful—like a chicken that’s never heard of soup. You end it curled up in a padded cell, speaking in tongues, twitching every time a phone rings like a turkey in November.
Step one: dial the number. Easy, right?
No.
You will—without fail—get at least one digit wrong. Not because you’re stupid, but because the number on the website is from a dream someone once had about a phone number. So instead of reaching, say, the front desk of a clinic in Nairobi, you end up talking to Ahmed the Explosives Intern, currently based out of a goat shed in rural Somalia.
You try again. This time, with the correct number.
The phone rings. And rings. And rings.
Because:
a. It’s Monday morning before 10 a.m.—which in local office culture is known as “do not disturb unless you’re on fire.”
They are spiritually unavailable. Emotionally on strike. They’re either recovering from a weekend of bad decisions or still asleep behind a desk. Possibly both.
b. It’s not Monday. You called between 8:30 and 11:00, which is technically breakfast part 3. Or pre-lunch. Or “we’re here but philosophically not.”
c. You dared call between 12 and 3 p.m.—a block of time reserved for the most sacred ritual in East African office tradition: The Extended Siesta of Righteous Indifference.
At this point, the entire office is quieter than a nun’s funeral. Chairs are empty. Souls have left bodies. The phones ring into the void, heard only by ghosts of interns past.
d. It’s Friday. You’re screwed. On Fridays, phone calls are considered spiritual attacks. Nobody picks up unless it’s God, and even then, they’ll call Him back Monday.
But let’s say, by some cruel cosmic accident, someone finally picks up. Your joy is short-lived. Because now you face Phase Two: convincing this startled human—mid-nap, mid-chew, mid-existential crisis—that they work at a doctor’s office. You’d think this would be obvious. You’d think the white coats, the stethoscopes, the endless smell of antiseptic and existential dread would tip them off.
But no. What greets you is a voice that sounds like it hasn’t been fully alive since 1993, speaking in a frequency just below human comprehension—somewhere between a dying fax modem and a snoring wildebeest.
You cheerfully explain:
“Hi, I’m calling to make an aviation medical appointment.”
This is met with:
- A pause so long your phone threatens to go into sleep mode.
- A sigh that suggests you just asked them to perform heart surgery.
- A question like, “What is your problem?” as if your mere existence is already too much to handle.
You try again. You slow down. You mention “pilot,” “KCAA,” “eye exam,” “medical.” They respond like you asked them to build a space station out of dental floss. And that’s when it hits you:
In more functional societies, the person who answers the phone at a doctor’s office usually:
- Knows they work there.
- Has spoken to other humans before.
- Understands concepts like time, schedules, and—dare I dream—patients.
Here? You’re just a telephonic mosquito buzzing into a state-sponsored fever dream—annoying, irrelevant, and about to be swatted by the holy trinity of East African gatekeeping: bad attitude, worse service, and a total collapse of logic. Still. You keep calling. Because deep down, somewhere between your liver and your last remaining brain cell, hope lives on.
This time, however, things were different. Because this time—tragically, inevitably—the idiot… was me. I wasn’t ambushed by a corrupt official. I wasn’t derailed by a missing document. I wasn’t even stymied by a goat chewing through the telephone cables (though, in hindsight, that would’ve been a mercy).
No.
I was undone by my own unhinged optimism and linguistic overconfidence—two traits that, when combined, are more destructive than a hammer to a laptop.
I braced myself and dialled the number Chris had given me. Bright-eyed. Bushy-tailed. Radiating the smug energy of a man convinced he’s about to outsmart the system—unaware he’s seconds away from peeing on an electric fence.
Cardinal Mistake #1: Trying Swahili.
Now, this suicidal idea didn’t come out of nowhere. I’d picked up the habit in Mexico, where massacring the local language in a cheerful tone usually got me free tequila and a pat on the back. But this wasn’t Mexico.
This was Kenya.
Different continent.
Different rules.
Different threshold for verbal war crimes.
The phone rang.
And rang.
And ranged itself into the next geological era—until finally, blessedly, someone picked up.
“Jambo!!!” I chirped.
Too loud.
Too enthusiastic.
Too everything.
And then, like the linguistic kamikaze I was, I added:
“Kwa Heri?”
SLAM. Line dead. Just like my dignity. Only later—after I’d stopped vibrating from embarrassment—did I discover that Kwa Heri means “Goodbye.” So I basically screamed “HELLO, NOW KINDLY FUCK OFF” into someone’s ear before they’d even had their tea.
Not ideal. Not even by my standards. But of course, I wasn’t done yet. I’m never done when there’s room for more humiliation. So I tried again. This time, I dialled with less confidence and the emotional posture of a man trying to cancel his own death certificate. Thirty-seven rings later, someone answered.
“Jambo?”
The voice was alive. Suspicious. Possibly chewing something.
“Oh, Jambo indeed!” I yelled—just as a matatu full of screaming passengers, a screaming goat, and a Zumba-meets-Polka remix detonated nearby and nearly blew me off my feet. It felt like calling from inside a blender. I recovered. Breathed.
“Jambo?” I whispered again—this time like a telemarketer who knows he's going to hell.
Then, mustering my best faux-local charm, I added:
“Habari?” (“How are you?”)
Pause.
A pause so long I started hearing my own heartbeat—and possibly a second one from the worm of shame growing in my gut.
Then, in perfect, accent-free Queen’s English, she responded:
“How can I help you, Sir?”
I froze.
It felt like being slapped with a thesaurus.
“Uhm… yes. Marcel Romdane here. You may have heard of me? No? That’s okay. I’m calling to make an appointment.”
“What is your problem, Mr. Romdane?”
Her tone was surgical. Clean. Precise. Bordering on homicide.
“Well… hopefully none,” I said, voice cracking. “That’s kind of the whole point of the check-up.”
“Then why are you calling?”
“Because I need an appointment,” I said, now visibly sweating through the phone line.
“Why would you need an appointment if you don’t have a problem?”
This woman was playing 5D bureaucratic chess while I was choking on my own shoelaces.
“Madam, I just want an aviation medical. I sincerely hope there’s no problem yet, but if this conversation continues, I might develop an aneurysm.”
“We can’t help you, Mr. Romdane,” she deadpanned.
“And I doubt anyone here will give you a medical.”
“Really?” I sputtered. “And why’s that?”
“Because, Mr. Romdane…”
Her sigh was long enough to qualify as an audiobook.
“You’ve called a law firm. We’re next door to Dr. Gatabaki. One digit off. Happens more than you’d think.”
“…Oh.”
The floor dropped out beneath me. I could feel my ancestors collectively shaking their heads.
“Would you like the correct number?”
“Yes. Please. Thank you. God bless you. Anything.”
“Kwa Heri,” she said—sweetly this time.
Goodbye.
And this time… I understood.
Perfectly.
A few days later, I walked into Dr. Gatabaki’s office—expecting, naturally, a collapsing garden shed held together by termites and Band-Aids stapled with hope. Maybe a janitor’s closet doubling as a triage unit. You know, the usual.
But no.
Dr. Gatabaki’s clinic looked like it had been teleported in from a futuristic Scandinavian hospital—complete with brushed steel fixtures, ambient lighting, whisper-quiet air conditioning, and that eerie, unsettling scent of actual hygiene. The kind that makes you question if you’ve just stepped into a wellness ad or a government experiment.
I half-expected the entire cast of Emergency Room to walk in slow motion through the automatic doors—clean-shaven, emotionally stable, and grinning like lobotomised Buddhas—while soft piano music swelled in the background. You know the type: doctors who stay calm as Hindu cows even when someone rolls in with a machete in their neck and a live grenade in their pants.
Meanwhile, I stood there looking like a lost backpacker who’d taken a wrong turn into an alternate dimension of competence. A clown at a funeral. A kebab stand at a vegan convention. Just me and my derailed expectations, dripping with aviation sweat and third-world trauma, trying to process how this spotless oasis existed in the same city where potholes could swallow buses and street dogs ran local government.
Compared to the German office where I got my first aviation medical—which resembled a deflated Oktoberfest beer tent run by a chain-smoking man named Horst with tremors —this place was a surgical cathedral.
The secretary smiled. The floor didn’t creak. No buckets catching ceiling drips. The waiting area had leather couches—actual couches, not repurposed church pews or the twisted metal remnants of a 1987 Peugeot. The chairs were so comfortable I briefly considered staying until retirement or death, whichever came first.
“Hello, Mr. Romdane,” came a voice so warm it elevated the room temperature by five degrees and possibly fertilised nearby houseplants. Dr. Gatabaki rose from behind his desk with the slow, deliberate grace of a man who had seen it all—plane crashes, goat-inflicted concussions, emergency surgeries lit by phone flashlights—and offered a handshake so firm it came with an unspoken disclaimer: I’ve survived worse than you, but go ahead, try me.
It was the kind of handshake that says, “I still have a flicker of faith in humanity, but I’ve also personally witnessed a grown man try to bribe a flight examiner with mangoes, and I once signed off a pilot who flew into a hangar because he thought it was the runway.”
His eyes scanned me like a human luggage X-ray, calmly assessing whether I was just another confused white man with a saviour complex or the harbinger of a fresh plague. And I—radiating that dangerous blend of clueless optimism and half-baked conviction—was about to confirm that whatever horrors he’d witnessed before were just another Tuesday in my life.
Because while he’d probably seen pilots turn up high on jet fuel, argue with ceiling fans, or fly into mountains because the GPS said so—he hadn’t yet met me. I wasn’t a cautionary tale. I was a full-blown educational disaster film with deleted scenes too grotesque for public broadcast. And I had just walked into his office, smiling, breathing, and carrying the conversational equivalent of a flaming dumpster full of bad ideas and elephant-saving dreams duct-taped to an aviation license.
“So, you’re here for an aviation medical?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied, still visibly disoriented by the cleanliness—like a medieval peasant stumbling into a five-star hotel bathroom. “Need it to convert my German license into something the KCAA might acknowledge without spitting out their coffee.”
“What brings you to Kenya? Oh—and if you wouldn’t mind, could you turn around and read that poster behind you?”
I blinked, “Uh… yeah, sure, that’s A, C, D, R, T, E.”
“Splendid!” he beamed, with the giddy enthusiasm of a man who just found out his patient can, in fact, see. “That’s 20/20. You’d be surprised how many aviators here are flying blind—literally. As long as you’re not walking into running propellers or buzzing the tower so low the coffee machine throws itself behind the fire extinguisher, you're practically a national treasure.”
Then came the “casual” conversation—except it wasn’t casual. It was strategic. A verbal MRI scan. He was probing for signs of psychosis, blunt force trauma, or unresolved issues with my kindergarten buddies. No stethoscope. No blood pressure cuff. No creepy American ritual where someone grabs your balls, stares into your soul, and asks you to cough like you're auditioning for a job at a striptease parlour run by retired Army Captains with boundary issues. No bloodletting in the hallway by a man named Moses using a syringe last sterilised during colonial times. No grimy lab where chickens roamed free and test tubes doubled as shot glasses. No echoing PA system calling out patient numbers like racehorses at a cursed derby. Just a man, a desk, and the slowly dawning suspicion that I might be his strangest patient of the decade.
Then, he leaned forward—lowering his voice to the kind of tone reserved for conspiracies, witchcraft, or admitting you still use Internet Explorer.
“Listen, Mr. Romdane,” he said, like a priest prepping me for exorcism, “I could do the whole routine. EKG, EEG, allergy panels, colour blindness, lung scans, oxygen uptake, brainwave mapping, chakra alignment, tarot cards, maybe even a goat sacrifice under the next full moon. But let me save us both the time.”
He paused. His eyes narrowed.
“Here in Kenya, pilots don’t die from anaemia. They die from their airplanes. And from stupidity. Occasionally both—simultaneously.”
He leaned back with the satisfied sigh of a man who’s seen a propeller fall off mid-flight and the pilot blame the clouds.
“And frankly, Mr. Romdane… those are not things I can fix.”
I stared.
“Yes,” he continued, completely unfazed—like a man who’s personally watched God shrug and walk away—“your medical? That’s the least of my concerns.”
He leaned forward slightly, with the calm intensity of someone delivering bedtime stories during a hostage situation.
“The most dangerous moment for a Kenyan pilot is right after the aircraft returns from maintenance. That’s when hell doesn’t just break loose—it files a flight plan, runs up the engine, and cartwheels across the runway in a fireball of negligence.”
He started counting off on his fingers like he was reading from the Book of Aviation Nightmares:
“A wing reattached upside down, Fuel tank drained and refilled with genetically modified fertilisers, The yoke forgotten entirely—missing. Gone. Just a polite hole where once there was flight control, Propeller bolted on with recycled chewing gum and a prayer whispered by a drunk mechanic who thinks torque specs are a myth invented by British colonisers.”
He leaned back and shrugged—casually, clinically, catastrophically.
“If you ever walk into a hangar here and see the mechanic lighting a cigarette… while aviation fuel drips from the rafters like satanic rainfall—you turn around, Mr. Romdane.
Slowly.
No sudden moves.
Try not to spook the ghosts.”
I nodded.
Half in awe, half in panic, and fully aware that I might’ve just bought a one-way ticket to the Darwin Awards.
“So,” he said, folding his hands like a man bracing for impact, “what brings you here—personally, I mean?”
“Well…” I beamed, with the delusional confidence of someone pitching a children’s book to a war tribunal, “I came to save elephants.”
Dead silence.
The kind of silence that sucks the oxygen out of a room and replaces it with pure disbelief.
Dr. Gatabaki blinked—once, slowly—like someone trying to process a noise only dogs can hear. His face tightened into the cautious neutrality of a seasoned professional trying to decide whether he’s talking to a visionary… or a walking human catastrophe wrapped in privilege and bad decisions.
“Save… elephants?” he asked, gently. “Who said they needed saving?”
His voice didn’t hold curiosity. It held concern. Deep, medical concern. Not for the elephants. For me. The kind reserved for full-blown psychiatric evaluations and reality-detached tree huggers who wander barefoot into government offices announcing they’re here to teach fish how to ride bicycles—for the sake of diversity, emotional healing, or world peace through synchronised swimming. I could see it happening in his head—the slow drafting of the internal memo, the imaginary stamp pounding into government paper like a coffin nail:
KCAA MEDICAL: DENIED
Reason: Patient exhibits extreme symptoms of terminal White Saviour Syndrome.
Sub-symptoms include: Messiah complex, cultural hallucinations, elevated ego, and delusions of National Geographic grandeur.
Recommend: Full psychological debrief, airport expulsion, and exile to a continent with fewer moving parts.
His eyes met mine again. And in that moment, the man was no longer a doctor.
He was a witness. To an unfolding disaster so bizarre, so fantastically unnecessary, it could only have been authored by a Muzungu on a mission.
Still, he remained curious.
Possibly in a detached, medical kind of way. Possibly in full denial that people like me—though rare and best kept behind warning signs—actually exist outside of a movie where you leave the theatre and mutter:
“Well, great plot, but no one’s that stupid in real life.”
And yet… there I was.
In his office.
Smiling.
So, like an addicted gaffer at the scene of a flaming 37-car pileup, counting limbs, lawsuits, and possibly goats, he pressed on:
“So… you want to save the elephants. And how exactly did you arrive at that epiphany? I mean, what’s your plan exactly?”
I blinked.
Then I threw him that particular questioning look. The kind of look only someone who had completely bypassed adulthood, strategic planning, and probably most vaccinations could manage.
“What plan?” I asked, genuinely puzzled. As if the word plan had just been invented and I wasn’t quite sold on the concept yet.
Dr. Gatabaki stared. His eyes glazed with the hollow commitment of a man trapped in a conversation that might one day be used in a malpractice deposition.
So I clarified.
“It’s not really a plan,” I said, gesturing vaguely like an inflatable tube man with divine purpose.
“It’s more of a calling. A... vibe. You know, an instinct.”
“An instinct.”
“Yes! The universe nudged me.”
He leaned forward slightly, as if bracing for an incoming confession that involved either hallucinogens or alien voices coming from tree bark. I looked him dead in the eye, radiating the unwavering conviction of a man who had skimmed one emotionally manipulative headline and decided to re-engineer continental fate before brunch.
“You see,” I began, chest puffed, eyes gleaming, “it started… with a newspaper.”
Gatabaki blinked once. A silence fell across the room like a curtain drawn on sanity. I continued—unstoppable, ill-advised, possibly concussed:
“I had just returned from a safari in the Mara. It was glorious. Elephants everywhere—like God had spilled a bag of grey jellybeans across the savannah.”
I paused for dramatic effect—the kind of pause you use before announcing you’ve bought a submarine on Craigslist.
“My soul was still buzzing from the bush when I stumbled upon a newspaper one of my employees had left on my desk—strategically, I might add—because she knew about my deeply irrational affection for elephants and assumed, quite correctly, that I’d treat the article like divine scripture.”
The headline had screamed like a NASCAR tire on fire at 320 km/h:
“HELP SAVE THE AFRICAN ELEPHANTS!! ONLY A FEW LEFT!!”
I gasped audibly, as if discovering I’d left the stove on. “Only a few left?”
Had I imagined the herds?
Were they Hollywood requisites left over from Out of Africa?
“But I read on,” I said, leaning in like I was about to confess the moon landing was filmed in a Denny’s parking lot. “And that’s when I read about... Krueger.”
Dr. Gatabaki said nothing. His soul briefly left his body, hovered near the ceiling fan, then came back with a note that read: “We’re not equipped for this.”
I continued, utterly unfazed and completely absorbed by my own secondhand delusions—eyes gleaming, voice full of unearned purpose.
“Apparently some volunteer. Allegedly a conservationist. But let’s be honest—more likely a granola-fuelled messiah complex wrapped in khaki and sunburn. The article claimed he lived in a ‘remote bush camp,’ working for some painfully unimaginative NGO with all the creative spark of a tax seminar: The Mara Elephant Project.”
I scoffed.
“The name alone sounded like a rejected 90s boy band managed by Walmart. It had all the soul of an IKEA shelving manual and the thrill of lukewarm quinoa. You could practically hear the tagline: ‘Saving Elephants, One Committee Meeting at a Time—lunch breaks included.’”
I turned to Dr. Gatabaki, finger raised.
“Krueger,” I declared. “Picture Indiana Jones—but vegan. Overweight. Self-important. Possibly armed with a ukulele.
Dr. Gatabaki visibly recoiled.
“And this Krueger,” I hissed, “offered solutions.”
I made air quotes so violently they should’ve been registered as hand-to-hand combat.
“Satellite radios. Surveillance drones. Trained dogs. Guilt-ridden Western volunteers with unresolved parental trauma. But most critically…”
I paused again.
“Bush planes.”
Gatabaki tilted his head, like a dog hearing jazz.
“That’s right,” I declared. “Bush planes. That was the moment I ignited. That’s when the gears started turning. The moment the universe pulled my file, read my tragic pilot backstory, and whispered: ‘Your redemption arc has arrived.'"
“Bush planes? Heroic aerial patrols? Top Gun: Pachyderm Protocol?! You can’t write this stuff!”
I flailed like a prophet mid-seizure, conducting an invisible orchestra of chaos, while Gatabaki stared as if I were a walking malpractice risk.
“I mean—clearly—they needed someone. A saviour. A Maverick. A guy with a moustache and a marginal grasp of Swahili to fly low and righteous over the savannah. Someone to fight poachers with sheer presence, dramatic fly-bys, and possibly pamphlets dropped from altitude!”
At this point, even the fluorescent lights dimmed in sympathy. Dr. Gatabaki didn’t move. Not a twitch. Not a breath. He stared at me the way a seasoned bartender watches a man order tequila, whisper to himself, then headbutt the jukebox.
Finally, after what felt like an entire presidency had passed, he spoke—carefully, like talking to a hallucinating man on a window ledge holding a squirrel he thinks is his lawyer:
“So... let me get this straight. You became a pilot. You flew here. You bought a plane. You brought it here. You read one headline, saw the words elephant and danger, then emotionally adopted an entire species like it was a rescue puppy?”
He exhaled slowly—very slowly—like a man trying to breathe through the last charred remnants of his medical credibility.
“Exactly,” I beamed. “But bigger. With tusks.”
Dr. Gatabaki didn’t move. For a second, I thought he’d died with his eyes open. Then he blinked—once—like his soul had just buffered.
“And now,” he said slowly, “your master plan is to what—track down some granola-stained eco-hipster with a Jesus complex and offer him... air support?”
“Yes! See? Now we’re getting somewhere.”
There was a long pause. A medical-grade pause. A pause so thick with disbelief it could be bottled and sold as a sedative. He didn’t speak. He didn’t blink. He just sat there—staring at the human glitch in front of him. A glitch with a passport, a half-drowned airplane, and the unwavering confidence of a man who once got lost in IKEA and decided to open his own furniture store inside the warehouse. And in that silence, somewhere deep within the fabric of the universe, I’m convinced God dropped His clipboard and muttered:
“Oh no. He’s serious.”
“So, Marcel,” Shlomi coughed, side-eyeing me like a bomb technician with a hangover, “You actually got the medical? On the spot? That usually takes a week minimum. And at least two bribes—three if your paperwork's in order.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” I replied, rewinding the moment in my brain like a half-melted VHS tape. “He gave me this… strange look. Then asked for a hundred bucks. Took a deep breath. And handed me the signed medical like it was a cursed relic from a temple I shouldn’t have entered. Then he—uh—kind of… shoved me out the door.”
Shlomi blinked.
Once.
Twice.
The kind of blinking that happens when someone realises they’re standing next to a cosmic accident… and might be legally responsible.
“You think that’s not how it normally goes, Shlomi?” I asked, suddenly wondering if I’d just bypassed protocol—or sanity.
He didn’t answer immediately. Just stared at me with that deeply conflicted look only close friends and psychiatric nurses can pull off. Somewhere between admiration and fear. As if he was impressed… but also preparing for the fallout. Possibly with fire extinguishers and rosary beads. Because now—suddenly, horrifyingly—it was becoming real. I wasn’t just playing safari Jesus in my head anymore. I wasn’t just ranting about elephant justice like some crank at a farmers market.
I had a medical.
A plane (somewhere off the Somali coast, but still technically mine).
A camera.
And the kind of manic, untouchable momentum that can only come from divine misunderstanding and an utter lack of self-preservation.
And Shlomi saw it.
He felt it.
He realised what most people don’t until it’s far too late:
I wasn’t going to be stopped.
Not by bureaucracy.
Not by reason.
Not by the collective wisdom of ten thousand smarter people screaming “don’t.”
I was too far gone.
Too deluded.
Too enthusiastically committed to a plan so reckless that even my guardian angel had tossed in the towel, called in sick, and was now drinking heavily in the corner of the astral plane.
And so, as the Nairobi sun dipped behind the skyline like a curtain falling on Act One of a theatrical catastrophe, Shlomi sighed, rubbed his face, and muttered:
“You’re actually going to do it, aren’t you?”
And I—beaming, borderline radioactive—just nodded.
“Yup,” I nodded, the words floating out of my mouth with the serene certainty of a cult leader mid-sermon.
“First thing tomorrow I’ll be out to find an airstrip. Possibly a maintenance shop in the afternoon. And oh, I need to drop that medical at the KCAA and pick up my license.”
Shlomi didn’t blink. Didn’t breathe. Probably forgot how.
“If everything goes well,” I continued cheerfully, as if I were planning a picnic and not declaring war on bureaucracy, “we might even find a Land Rover by Friday. Maybe a used one. Nothing fancy. Just something that can outrun hyenas and occasionally float.”
And Shlomi knew—deep in his reluctant, horrified soul—that I wasn’t bluffing.
I was going to wake up tomorrow and march headfirst into the Kenyan aviation-industrial abyss like a man possessed.
Because I was possessed.
By hope.
By delusion.
By the unkillable, flaming conviction that somehow, despite it all—this was going to work.
That’s what scared him.
Not the plan.
Not the danger.
Not even the elephants.
What scared him was that somehow, in this entire smoldering circus of chaos…
I might actually pull it off.
Marcel Romdane, signing off—
still smoldering, slightly unstable, and somehow cleared for takeoff.
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