Surgery Singers of Imfondo, Congo

I plug a suction cup microphone device into the jack that says “phone” and phone our our surgeon. Phone means telephone, right?.

It’s about my dozenth attempt to reach him at the remote Congo hospital and this time I reach him! I ask him my 10 questions, first in English then muddling through the German that a co-worker has kindly written for me.

All the answers are there in two languages . . . until I try to play them back on the little cassette deck. And I realize I’ve just tried to record through the earphone jack!

It's because I’m not working with a newsgatherer’s recorder that DOES have a phone jack, but instead a small cassette player. So, I don’t have a recording from Congo. I have my own voice. In my office in Quito, Ecuador. Asking questions in badly pronounced German.


After my red-faced apologies over the long distance phone lines, we try it yet again. The interview winds down and my closing question (as usual): “Is there anything you’d like to add?” And suddenly it is all worth the multiple dialings, the French-language recording that I didn’t understand, the effort put into translating my questions into German.

"I'm so thankful for Africa," he says.

"Africa is a singing continent. And it's incredible how they sing. They sing in the morning and they sing at night. They come home from their fields, loaded up with a heavy load . . . and they sing!


"And the nicest thing I've seen here is, if you operate on a patient and the operation comes to an end and the abdomen is still open, and the patient starts singing. And the nurses, they even sing with the patient. The whole OR team and the patient are singing, and you're closing the abdomen, praising God for the operation."

To the surgeon, the description wasn’t good enough.

"You must have been in there. that's something very, very special I've seen here several times."

But to me in an office in Ecuador, it was wonderful.



To hear an interview segment, click here.