Herzog relates the activity of the Flying Doctor Service, an organization founded by UK surgeon Michael Woods, that try to provide local tribes with medical assistance and education, operating in Kenya Tanzania and Uganda. They avail themselves of airplanes to fly where normal missionaries' (usually Christian nuns and priests) skills in surgery are not enough and a professional surgeon is required.
Among the other things, we are shown a faith-healer (who gets paid from people he deceives, but would never admit his earnings), and related how differently a different animal species than the Western mankind perceives and conceives reality, even in regards with diseases and how to heal those. For some instance: the successfulness of an operation is believed to be in proportion with the dimension of what is taken away, many are afraid to step on little stairs leading to the inside of a van, they try to eat food at any occasion before undergoing surgery no matter the medical personnel's effort in explaining it will probably be fatal; an operation or injection is trusted to be effective much more than something having no immediately visible effect, like pills, since the brain of these species has not reached the stage where it can link cause and outcome over a temporal distance.
This exhaustive documentary concludes — which extensively features Flying Doctors's founder presence — criticizing our inability to realise how diverse the brain and thus the thought structures are between European and Central African human species, how groundless is our expectation they may learn anything we explain them in our terms, and what a wide change of mindset about educating these populations would it take of us to be of real help. This is a work from Herzog in the beginnings of his career and moreover in the 70s' cultivated European milieu: it is well comprehensible that he speaks of this question in zealously time-serving terms. That parents frequently refuse to let a son returning from medical treatment live again with them, and this might be the only chance for kids to go to the school and receive a modern education, makes Herzog wonder whether this be good for the child or not. One could notice that it is oddly inconsistent to wonder about this and not also if it be good or not for these populations to receive financial and medical support.
Among the other things, we are shown a faith-healer (who gets paid from people he deceives, but would never admit his earnings), and related how differently a different animal species than the Western mankind perceives and conceives reality, even in regards with diseases and how to heal those. For some instance: the successfulness of an operation is believed to be in proportion with the dimension of what is taken away, many are afraid to step on little stairs leading to the inside of a van, they try to eat food at any occasion before undergoing surgery no matter the medical personnel's effort in explaining it will probably be fatal; an operation or injection is trusted to be effective much more than something having no immediately visible effect, like pills, since the brain of these species has not reached the stage where it can link cause and outcome over a temporal distance.
This exhaustive documentary concludes — which extensively features Flying Doctors's founder presence — criticizing our inability to realise how diverse the brain and thus the thought structures are between European and Central African human species, how groundless is our expectation they may learn anything we explain them in our terms, and what a wide change of mindset about educating these populations would it take of us to be of real help. This is a work from Herzog in the beginnings of his career and moreover in the 70s' cultivated European milieu: it is well comprehensible that he speaks of this question in zealously time-serving terms. That parents frequently refuse to let a son returning from medical treatment live again with them, and this might be the only chance for kids to go to the school and receive a modern education, makes Herzog wonder whether this be good for the child or not. One could notice that it is oddly inconsistent to wonder about this and not also if it be good or not for these populations to receive financial and medical support.