Cindy McCain’s first visit to Rwanda in 1994 was during the high season of roadblocks, machetes and shallow graves. After a call for help from Doctors Without Borders, McCain had assembled a medical team with the intention of setting up a mobile hospital in Rwanda. Arriving by private plane in mid-April, a couple of weeks into the massacres, she realized the chaos made deploying her team impossible. At the airport, she paid for the use of a truck and set out for Goma in then-Zaire, where hundreds of thousands of refugees were headed. “I never saw anyone harmed,” McCain recalls, “but I saw the bodies along the roadside.” Checkpoints were manned by 12- and 13-year-olds with AK-47s. Along the way, she picked up several abandoned young people, later given to the care of an Irish charity. “You could see the chaos, hear the shots, hear the screaming. You could smell it.” What, I asked her, could you smell? “The smell of death,” she replied. Helping refugees Arriving across the border in Goma, which is now in Congo, McCain found cholera victims stacked beside the road “like highway barriers.” The field hospital covered four acres. McCain’s team provided primary care for the sick and frightened refugees, many of them suffering dehydration. For nearly a month, McCain organized food and water for the operation, collecting supplies at the Goma airport. The rushing return of these memories came on with McCain’s first visit to Rwanda since the ...
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Cindy McCain’s first visit to Rwanda in 1994 was during the high season of roadblocks, machetes and shallow graves. After a call for help from Doctors Without Borders, McCain had assembled a medical team with the intention of setting up a mobile hospital in Rwanda. Arriving by private plane in mid-April, a couple of weeks into the massacres, she realized the chaos made deploying her team impossible. At the airport, she paid for the use of a truck and set out for Goma in then-Zaire, where hundreds of thousands of refugees were headed. “I never saw anyone harmed,” McCain recalls, “but I saw the bodies along the roadside.” Checkpoints were manned by 12- and 13-year-olds with AK-47s. Along the way, she picked up several abandoned young people, later given to the care of an Irish charity. “You could see the chaos, hear the shots, hear the screaming. You could smell it.” What, I asked her, could you smell? “The smell of death,” she replied. Helping refugees Arriving across the border in Goma, which is now in Congo, McCain found cholera victims stacked beside the road “like highway barriers.” The field hospital covered four acres. McCain’s team provided primary care for the sick and frightened refugees, many of them suffering dehydration. For nearly a month, McCain organized food and water for the operation, collecting supplies at the Goma airport. The rushing return of these memories came on with McCain’s first visit to Rwanda since the ...