Always these neighbors! Some people always have the music too loud, others babble at you at every opportunity, and others only talk about their little problems, even when you’re on crutches. The fact that Oliver Blume’s life has taken place in the most remote, broken places on this planet for more than 20 years is also due to a neighborhood story. A pleasant one, of course.
The year is 2002. After working in Budapest, Freiburg and Solingen, the oral surgeon Blume opened a practice in Munich with a partner, a spacious establishment with a pinball machine and an American diner bar in the middle of the valley, the bustling heart of the city the Rewe – and right next to Dr. Heinrich Schoeneich. The now 75-year-old was not only a renowned plastic surgeon, but also someone who for decades went where it really hurt: to the war zones of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma and Thailand. In 1980 he was the founder of the Munich section of Interplast, an association that carries out free plastic surgery in developing countries.
That’s where flower comes into play. Schoeneich had noticed that the rascal from Delmenhorst was not one to be content with his chic clientele (including Philipp Lahm, Toni Kroos, Holger Badstuber, Kingsley Coman), but had previously worked as a medical assistant in Peru, Burma and Vietnam , Egypt. Blume’s former boss had recognized: Ah, he has wanderlust and a thirst for adventure. And he is prepared to live under the simplest conditions.
Blume’s first excursion took him to Egypt in the mid-1990s, where he helped set up a department for jaw surgery in a 5,000-bed hospital, gave lectures and trained doctors. How does it get you there? Well, the local university clinics that need help turn to organizations such as the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) or Interplast, i.e. Schoeneich. At some point he grabbed his neighbor and said: “You’re still young, single, unsuccessful – don’t you like to go where no one wants to go? Where there are child soldiers, HIV, volcanic eruptions, famine, Ebola, etc.?” Blume’s laconic answer: “If you ask me so nicely, I’ll take a look at it.” It was to be the beginning of a wonderful friendship, a close bond with a left-behind continent: Africa.
The team includes an anesthetist from Uganda, “that creates trust”
Schoeneich needed a surgeon in East Africa, so Blume made his way to Uganda in 2003 – and fell in love. The area, the people, his job as a helper there. His job: to operate on children with cleft lip and palate, one of the most common congenital malformations in the world that affects breathing, swallowing, speaking and hearing. It’s an operation that hardly any doctor there can do. Blume does: “I always knew that we as oral surgeons can be of great help to people with simple means. To operate on a cleft like this, I need a knife, scissors, a needle and thread – and my knowledge.”
That’s exactly what he wanted and wants to pass on to this day: “I said to Interplast: ‘I’d like to do it, but in my own way, with a university connection.’ Because I firmly believe that it’s not enough just to operate on patients. Rather, you have to train people on site.” Helping people to help themselves: the eternal core issue when it comes to development aid.
Blume viewed his actions in Mbarara in the south of the country and later also in Rwanda, Tanzania, Kenya and Burundi as “green meadows that you can mow.” At the time, Uganda was seen as a democratic figurehead with anti-corruption and anti-HIV campaigns. Blume wasn’t on his own: the team includes Gunther Au-Balbach, his former senior physician, whom he trained in Solingen, and Emmanuel Munyarugero, an anesthesiologist from Uganda: “He’s been there from the beginning, speaks the languages, has the same skin color , which creates trust. Anesthesia in particular is particularly difficult for small, malnourished, seriously ill children and babies. However, in around a thousand operations we have never had an incident!”
“Very emotional moments for the mother”: a child operated on by Oliver Blume’s team in Freetown/Sierra Leone.
(Photo: Oliver Blume)
Well, define incident. During his most recent operation in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, he ran out of oxygen in the middle of the operation – a brand new anesthesia machine from China had a leak. What to do? First operate the device. With bridging clamps, which he needs for the operation on the child anyway. After a few hectic phone calls, a rusty pickup truck rumbles into the hospital premises a little later with its cargo: two oxygen cylinders that the ministry had just had picked up from a ship in the harbor so that the operation could continue – welcome to the continent of improvisation.
It’s a truism that it can also be a very dangerous continent. During an operation in Burundi, then-President Pierre Nkurunziza (most likely died in 2020 as a result of a Covid-19 infection) had the helpers assassinated “because we didn’t bribe them,” Blume suspects. A grenade flew into the hotel room, which coincidentally had no one in it. But: All instruments and cameras were broken, and the team was flown out the next day. Blume later received a call from the federal government warning him that he was now on a list. Blume says: “Since then I’ve been no longer allowed to go to Burundi.” You have to see it that pragmatically.
In a two-week stay in Sierra Leone, the team performs between 50 and 100 jaw surgical procedures on two operating tables.
(Photo: Oliver Blume)
Where others would stay with the family since then – Blume now has four children – the oral surgeon simply carried on, this time in the West African country of Sierra Leone, a humanitarian nightmare, a country that is one of the most dangerous places on earth. And among the poorest: only Burundi is worse off on the poverty list. But there is hope in the land of blood diamonds: After ten years of the bloodiest civil war, weapons were demonstratively burned in 2002 and reconstruction began, which the Ebola outbreak in 2014 slowed down but did not stop.
A businessman had heard of Blume’s work in East Africa, and late last year he received an inquiry from the re-elected president’s health ministry. No one had systematically treated the so-called cleft children for decades. At the end of January, the Blume team was on a plane to Freetown. His first impression: “Nobody is starving on the streets, it’s a different kind of poverty, a depressive hopelessness. People no longer make any effort about how they live and live, according to the motto: Nothing changes anyway!”
Its location: a small but, thanks to the Don Bosco Foundation, well-equipped hospital in Freetown, which also serves as a safe space for abused children at night, Blume says: “Nowhere in the world has there been and is there more cruelty against children, Keyword: blood diamonds. Six-year-olds were drugged and wiped out entire villages with a Kalashnikov.” As Joseph Conrad wrote in “Heart of Darkness”: “The horror, the horror.”
“The main thing is that you have decent life insurance.”
At some point, of course, the question of why arises. What drives a busy family man in his late 50s, who also plays tennis and makes music very respectably (including a children’s CD with Claudia Koreck), out and into the misery of the world? Blume says: “When a mother holds her child who has undergone surgery in her arms, these are very emotional moments. All of this also gives me strength for my own family and my professional work.” The children are proud of their dad, his wife Anna says: “I don’t care about anything, the main thing is that you have decent life insurance.” They also have a sense of humor, the Blumes.
But doesn’t he take all the terrible images of poverty and despair home with him? How does he get back here after a stint in hell? Blume says: “Totally happy, full of energy and with my head washed, grounded, humble, I don’t get upset about not getting a parking space. I can tolerate the malaria prophylaxis and don’t need a five-star hotel.” So what’s the problem? Why not just do it: help.
The question of financing remains. Blume traveled to Freetown with the support of the German Cleft Children’s Aid, otherwise he has been collecting donations for twelve years with a charity tennis tournament at the facility in Munich’s Luitpoldpark, where 25,000 euros have been raised. Of course it’s never enough, and Blume hasn’t had enough either: “I prefer to fly there more often, always for one to two weeks. We can manage 50 to 100 patients at two operating tables, plus lectures.” Immediately after the re-election, the ministry extended the teaching contract by written agreement, “five years, at least,” says Blume: “We don’t want to take a snapshot, but rather work sustainably.” You would love to have someone like Oliver Blume as a neighbor.