With no air ambulances in the vicinity, a tourist helicopter was scrambled to fly Amelie and her friend the 20 minutes to nearby Livingstone. ‘It was small, so I had my foot on my friend’s lap and there was blood everywhere,’ she says. ‘Then we flew over Victoria Falls. We had wanted to do that in a helicopter but it was so expensive. So I said to my friend, “Oh, look, we got the trip over the falls after all!”’
Amelie landed at a field hospital, where she was given painkillers and a tetanus injection, before the decision was taken to fly her 240 miles to the capital, Lusaka. She needed surgery – fast.
The teenagers were driven to an airstrip where a plane was waiting, along with her grandmother who had heard the news from local friends and raced to be by her granddaughter’s side.
‘I made sure there was a blanket over me so Granny didn’t know how bad it was,’ admits Amelie now. ‘I also phoned my mum. I was very much downplaying it: “Oh, it’s not a huge thing. They’re just gonna stitch it back together. No problem.” You’re trying so hard not to cry because then they’ll know you’re not OK. But there’s nothing they can do on the other side of the world.’
‘I thought it was like a little dog bite,’ Veronica tells me about that call. ‘I couldn’t even imagine that it was such an enormous croc. She completely downplayed it – “I’m fine, I’m fine.” Unbelievable.’
As the plane took off, a paramedic asked Amelie to try wiggling her toes. ‘So I did and they moved. I don’t even think the paramedic thought that was going to happen,’ she says. ‘I looked up at my friend and we both started crying.’
She remained convinced, however, that she was going to lose her foot, if not her entire leg. ‘I said to my friend, “Tell the doctors that I’m fine with whatever decision they make. Sign any consent form. Don’t think about it, just do it.”’
The next thing she remembers is regaining consciousness in her bed at Medland hospital in Lusaka after surgery. ‘I woke up and looked down and I just saw this massive metal structure. I was like, “Oh, so my leg is still there then”.’
She is full of praise for Dr Collin West, the Zambian trauma surgeon who managed to save her foot and ‘did things no one thought possible’. The teenager was in hospital for six days and had five surgeries – followed by another two at St Mary’s hospital in London, where she stayed for 10 days – as she battled to avoid infection.
At some point in the days following the attack, Amelie got her phone back and it hit home that her story had become headline news. She had hundreds of messages on her social media accounts; many were from concerned pals back home, others weren’t so friendly.
‘People online – who had never met me – sent messages. They were saying, “You should have died” and “it’s your own fault”. That’s quite difficult to deal with when you’re so far from home and you’re really not very well,’ she says. ‘For every 50 positive messages there’s always one negative – and it’s those that stick with you.
‘A lot of people said it was because I had a certain upbringing and was on a gap year. I think people just look for a reason to hate you. That was a lot harder to deal with than all the medical stuff.
‘It was like, “I’m going to give you absolutely no reason to say anything bad about me,”’ she says. ‘That helped push me to do the school.’
The day after the attack, Amelie and her friends had planned to volunteer at the nearby ‘pre-school’ – in reality the floor of the local church, where children aged three to six struggle to learn to write in the sand. ‘They are immediately stuck,’ says Amelie. ‘They can’t progress. But they really want to learn; they want to be doctors and teachers and they deserve to be able to do that.’
Now, she has started a fundraising page in the hopes of building a proper school for 104 children, setting a target of £50,000. It is, she says, her ‘therapy’.
