Far Away in the Sky: A Memoir of the Biafran Airlift

Some were paid. Some felt compelled by a duty to God. Some volunteered. Some died doing it. All flew on rickety old aircraft into a nighttime, wartime patch of African forest called Biafra. Far Away in the Sky gives the personal account of one of them, a young American volunteer who joined the largest civilian humanitarian relief airlift ever attempted. In 1968 millions of people, mostly children, were starving due to a military blockade of Biafra, the former Eastern Region of Nigeria. The World Council of Churches and Caritas International mounted a relief airlift. Flying at night to avoid Nigerian MiGs, without radar or any modern navigational aids, landing amid bombs on a stretch of road in the rain forest, the old planes delivered thousands of tons of food and medicines. UNICEF recruited six former United States Peace Corps Volunteers, including the author, to help unload the planes. The former volunteers had served in Nigeria and were familiar with the area and the people. To David Koren the people of Biafra, his former students and fellow teachers, constituted his motive for joining the airlift. Sometimes after unloading our planes in the dark, we evacuated children in the final stages of starvation. One boy, lying limp on a mat near the plane, looked up at me in the gloom and said, 'My father, why don't you speak to me? Don't you know me?' As he was about to pass into eternity he felt that no one - not his father, not God, no one - knew who he was. He survived. He grew up to be a successful adult. He has a name. Nearly a half a century later, because I wrote Far Away in the Sky, I learned his name. Now I want you to know his name. More than the story of a daring humanitarian rescue, this book reveals the astonishing future of the rescued children and their descendants.