Last plane from Khartoum
Citizens cross deserts to return to SA
Four litres of water, tinned sardines and instant noodles. That’s what Basil Stilwell scraped together last weekend for his 800km trip through the desert from Port Sudan to Khartoum, where he hoped to get on a repatriation flight to SA.
“Under different circumstances, I would’ve enjoyed the road trip, but it was hot and I finished my water before we got to Khartoum,” he said of the journey through endless sand, which took 12 hours.
One of hundreds of South Africans stranded across the continent, Stilwell was not sure how long he would have to wait to get home — or if he even would.
Around 376 South Africans are still waiting to come home from the Ivory
Coast, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Madagascar, Mauritius, Uganda, Kenya, Morocco, Senegal and Zambia, the Department of International Relations and Co-operation said.
Stilwell has long adapted to unpredictability. When he and his twin sister were nine, his father, who had no nautical experience, took them and his mother on a round-the-world yacht trip that lasted until he was 18.
His latest excursion, to a job as a marine terminal supervisor, was meant to last six weeks. It dragged on for almost three months because during the lockdown noone could fly in to relieve him. He started to catch and cook his own fish near the end.
Just before midnight on Wednesday, the chartered flight he was on from Khartoum — with stops in Uganda and the DRC — landed in Johannesburg.
Nearly 50 passengers were taken to a hotel for quarantine of two weeks.
On the flight was helicopter pilot Tamryn van Staden, 32, who used her aviation network to get South Africans back home from the three countries.
A pilot since the age of 15, and now also an instructor, Van Staden has flown in “many, many African countries” and was not deterred by the obstacles to secure the flight under lockdowns across the continent.
As Stilwell found, just getting out of Port Sudan was tricky; for a start, fuel was scarce. He got 50l of diesel from his company. This took him and a driver only halfway before they had to find more fuel.
“We left at about six in the morning and I had a good driver, who made numerous tea stops. I enjoyed the rural teahouses along the road, they are so communal,” he said.
In their battered made-in-China car, the pair went through one roadblock after another, from official stops at guardhouses with soldiers, to a man with a gun in a street blocking their way.
Not all the evacuations were as touchand-go, as the experiences of teachers Gordon and Dawn Aylward show.
From Durban, the couple flew to
Kampala on a contract to instruct other teachers in a new Christian curriculum.
When their Ethiopian Airlines tickets for March 20 were nullified, they could not get home. During April they were holed up in a hotel room. They continued working, doing presentations by computer for the other teachers.
“The isolation was very strict but the consulate was kind and bought us chronic medications. The church bought us food,” said Gordon.
A prayer and two wings got them airborne at last and back to their daughter and three grandchildren.
About 2,000 South Africans have been repatriated so far from all continents, according to the government.
Van Staden said the red tape and obstacles for the evacuation flight seemed insurmountable at first, but support from Miles van der Molen, the
CEO of private airline CemAir, the DA’s “Home Away From Home” website and the South African high commission in Kampala made it a reality.
“This was a massive team effort, with many sleepless nights,” she said. “The compassion of the passengers who were collected in Uganda and who went out of their way to make sure each person on the plane had a meal during the flight highlighted the spirt of ubuntu.”