By Sheldrick Wildlife Trust
As storms raged, a four-year-old boy from Asa went missing in the surrounding wilderness. A search party set out to track his tiny footprints, but it was a monumental task. The area chief had heard tales of a SWT pilot who had helped find a lost child the week before, and he knew who to call for help.
This isn’t the first time our pilot has joined a search-and-rescue mission. He flew 70 minutes to Asa, a community near Tsavo’s northeastern boundary. For hours, he crisscrossed the landscape looking for the boy, until darkness forced him turn back. One lost night stretched into several, and it seemed increasingly impossible that the boy would be found alive in such an unforgiving landscape.
The mission was quite literally like searching for a needle in a haystack. Without food or shelter, battered by rain and surrounded by predators, any human would struggle to survive — let alone a young child.
However, the search party refused to give up. On the sixth day, they had a breakthrough when they found fresh footprints. They again called our pilot, who raced to the scene. To narrow down the search area, he first focused on locating the ground team. This was a task in and of itself, as he had no way of communicating with them from the air.
And that is when a miracle happened: Glancing down, he saw a tiny figure running below, dwarfed by the endless wilderness. It was the boy! Without taking eyes off him, he circled overhead. The ground team was kilometres away, but they saw the plane and understood the signal.
Against all odds, this six-day saga had a happy ending. As is custom, the search party carried the boy 18 kilometres back to his village, singing blessings with each step. Our pilot met them there, along with two doctors. The boy was weak and scratched up, but otherwise unharmed.
Our pilot received a message from the boy’s parent’s today, with the news that their son has fully recovered. They also shared a very touching update about his name.
