Wow....almost two months since the last post on here.  Time flies when you're busy!  Here's whats been going on the last two months in pictures....in no special order whatsoever!

Buckled in and ready to go to Wamena!

A big highlight for us was another trip to our future home Wamena.  I was headed there to fly with one of our instructor pilots there and Heather and the kids came along.  On the way back, we got to stop and get out at an interior village, called "Mammitt".  It was Heather and the kids' first village experience!  

Not the greatest picture as the people are barely visible in the background, but oh well it's the only one we took!

Heather talks to Tracy, a friend of ours who happened to be in Mammitt that day.

Elise a little shy but willing to pose with some of the local kids.

Elise and Ian run around a little on the runway.  When I start flying solo, Mammitt is one of the places I will be going regularly as it is a fairly large and wide open runway, easier for us new guys!  I am very excited to be flying to this place as lots of neat things are happening there, including a new school opening up to help provide a quality education for village kids.  Education is such a need in interior villages and hopelessness can pervade these areas because it is just not available.  Mammitt has some exciting things going on on that front and we're praying future leaders for Papua are coming up right now in places like Mammitt!

A trip into Dem territory

Two weeks ago I felt a little bit like a kid in a candy store to get to fly with my instructor Tim to one of our newly opened airstrips.  It is the home of a people known as the "Dem".   I've heard that the Dem are a people who have felt forgotten, as they've seen tribal groups all around them get missionaries who have worked on Bible translations, but the Dem are still waiting.  You may wonder are the different tribal languages really that different?  Apparently they are.  There is another tribal group that lives immediately across the river, on the other side of the huge valley from the Dem who speaks an entirely different language.  If I don't have this backwards, the Dem live on the left side of the river in the photo below, inhabiting the gigantic jungle hillside.

Here's a picture of Tim and I with some of the people there, including one guy in the traditional gord!

The guy in the blue there speaks Indonesian really well and was able to tell us some about the people, though most of the people there can't speak Indonesian.  Most of them speak their "Bahasa suku"  or tribal language only.  On board with us was one of the missionaries moving in there to live with the Dem, learn their language and their customs and teach/translate the scriptures for them  It's absolutely cool that we at MAF get to play a small part in this!

On the Home Front

Every night at bed-time Ian loves to try and beat Elise to her bed and lay on it....so something like this ends up happening.

At family conference we got six of the original eight babies from language school last year together in a photo.

Had to get a picture of Ian with this little guy at a local festival featuring lots of people in their tribal dress.  Here's another photo from that....

An un-usually exciting day.....

Last Monday I left for my first time training away from our home base of Sentani....two nights in Wamena (our future home) flying with Alan, one of our instructor pilots up there, learning a few of the ropes of our future base and the airstrips around it.

So it wasn't just an exciting day for me.  Heather had a filling fall out just before I left (along with a few other things happening that made it seem like the wheels were coming off the wagon!)  So she drove by herself for the first time ever here in Papua to get it fixed (proud of you honey!) (We've been practicing!).  Driving here is a whole different ball game.  But the big learning curve for her is also learning the stick shift.  So Shes' put in a lot of work and finally feels comfortable doing it by herself!

There she is a few months back when she first started practicing.  Ian routinely exclaims "Go Mommy!" from his car seat in the back while she's driving.  Parking lots like the one in the background are rare here....since most people drive motorcycles.  So we had to go to a local governmental complex to find this one to practice in.  Fortunately MAF has a few cars here that we share with the other MAF families that live here.

Anyhow the same day I left for Wamena, she drove up to have her filling replaced by herself.  The dentist is a local pilot who does dentistry too. Yep that's right. The options are pretty slim here!  Apparently he's got a great reputation though and apparently he did a good job.  My wife has become very brave!

So on my flight to Wamena, we had some very special cargo on board.  It was my first time ever carrying bibles printed in a native Papuan language!  I was very excited to find that out.  They were destined for an interior Bible school.  In this picture there's a couple of sixty pound packs of Bibles in the cargo bay below the pilot door.  They were surely the fruit of the labor of decades of work, probably by missionaries and locals who worked together to translate the Bible into that language (I dont even know what language they were in).

Of course we had a lot of other stuff on board besides that but I had to share that one!

So in the village of Aphalaphsli (say that three times fast!) on the way to Wamena, the weather started rapidly deteriorating.  We actually got passengers ready who were going with us to Wamena and took off and evaluated the weather from the air.  Here's some pictures as we circled the airstrip/village of Aphalaphsli evaluating the weather situation

My instructor pilot Alan flew and evaluated while I watched and grabbed some pics and video...and here's some of that video....

So it became evident that our paths out of the Aphalaphsli area were blocked with weather.  So we landed, and spent the night!  After waiting on the ground until about four thirty PM we "gave it up" knowing that we would have to be on the ground in Wamena at five PM.  We are not permitted to fly after sunset here for very good reasons...it's way too mountainous.

Fortunately the locals were excited that we were going to stay the night.  They were friendly and helpful.  I personally was super excited about this.  I had a suitcase with me since I was supposed to overnight in Wamena anyways (at the MAF guest house)...so I was well prepared.  My instructor Alan, however, felt differently since it was his wife's birthday.  Big bummer!  But a great example to me of a pilot making a safe decision despite a very strong desire to make it home.

And that shot is looking down the airstrip towards the "grumpy" weather that soon overtook us.

Amazingly, this village had a little cabin set up for situations like this!  They were very hospitable to us.  The guy in the picture above and a few others sat in the living room of the cabin with us and chatted in Indonesian.  They brought us coffee and went to work making us food.  We had baked ubi (some sort of root) and mie (ramen) and baked potatoes.  I realized how nice this was when the local folks themselves passed around un-cooked potatoes to eat!  

So this is the bed room we stayed in.

Pretty great that they had beds ready to go for us!  It was at 3000 foot elevation so the temperature was ideal...not too hot not too cold.  The sound of the hard rain on the tin roof would have been a great sleeping aide...but we both had a pretty bad night of sleep because of that coffee they gave us!  Well it was a good thing I found out LATER that this village was infamous for cannibalism several decades ago (of course not any more).  That brought to life a few of the jokes Alan shared back and forth with the locals the night before as we ate and chatted.  

So the next morning was beautiful, and we got an early start and carried the same passengers from the day before out to Wamena.  We had a good flight training day afterwards, going from Wamena to another interior village and back, but we kept it short because we were both tired from the poor night of sleep in Aphalaphsli.  

A Bachelor Post

So now I am currently half way through one month of being a bachelor.  Why you ask?  Heather and the kids took the opportunity to travel back to Missouri and spend some time with family!  In order to make it worthwhile, staying three or four weeks is a must.  I did not go back with them, because to do so would use all of my yearly vacation up in one fell swoop....not a good thing here where planning occasional times of rest is a must!  So back here in Papua Indonesia I have been living vicariously through my sister in-law's facebook posts....pictures of Heather and the kids.  Here's a little video Holly posted of Ian saying everybody's names while running around.....Ian calls Holly "Hiya".....





And here's some of the pictures she's posted of Heather, Elise and Ian hanging out with family!
Thanks Holly for keeping the pics coming.  It's funny to me to see them wearing warm clothes...and so special to see them hanging out with family back there.  Fortunately we have the technology of Skype to still say hi to each other just about every day.  The kids still give me their routine hug, kiss and headbutt (yeah I know wierd) on skype before saying goodbye....but it's not quite the same!




Ipad users click here to see album...

While Heather and the kids have been enjoying family, parks, chipotle, target, etc, I have found myself with a lot of free time.  Which is good....because the last two weeks have been the busiest flight training days I have had yet.  I happened to bring my camera along last week, and here's a few pictures from some of the people/places I encountered (along with some other stuff Ive been up to).





Ipad users click here to see album

Among the highlights from last week....were taking two cute little kids to meet their grandparents for the first time who live in an interior village.   We also ran a "shuttle" from one village to another to take people who want to go to a church conference there...ten miles as the crow flies...but over a very large mountain ridge that makes our fifteen minute flight in the Kodiak worth its weight in gold!

While we were doing the shuttle run, I had some priceless moments of "learning by doing" where my instructor Tim, probably to his own amusement, took a step back and let me handle the tickets, weighing, and random requests by passengers by myself,  in a backwoods form of Indonesian.  Like I said, learning by doing!  It was a great learning experience, and a fantastic opportunity to serve the people that we flew across the ridge to the village where the church conference was.

Another highlight was receiving one of the best looking bunches of banannas I have ever seen as a gift from a lady at an interior airstrip/village called Okhika.  As I talked to the airstrip agent there (a local guy trained to help us)  I learned they have a bible school near that airstrip.  I asked him what it was called..."Sekolah Alkitab Bahasah Daerah"....which means "Bible School of the Local Language".  Here in Papua there are so many separate tribal languages (over 200) and each nook and cranny of the island has its own.  This bible school trains pastors for the language of the little valley that it is located in with, who knows maybe five thousand people or less living there and speaking that language.  How cool!

I have been asking for prayer for all sorts of good learning scenarios to happen during my training.....some of you all out there are praying for that...because it has been very good.  We have faced all sorts of great learning opportunities.  For example a few days ago we encountered a real systems failure!  Our electrical generator went bad on us  (we have lots of redundancy in these planes so we have another source of electrical power called an alternator...and we just used that as we flew home.)  It was a very non-dangerous and manageable situation, especially given our fair weather, but it was a great learning as we handled the situation for real.  It was something we talk about and study on the ground, but it was great experience to go through the procedures in the air to deal with it, including turning off non essential components to lighten the electrical load while flying home.  Much better to do the first time with an instructor pilot on board than by yourself!  So whoever is praying out there, thanks but don't pray too hard because we don't want too many more systems failures!

Exploring a New City!

It was our first time stepping foot outside of Indonesia since we arrived a year and a half ago.  We went to explore nearby Singapore!  It happened to be along the route of the trip that Heather is on right now.....visiting family in Missouri with the kids.  I went with them as far as Singapore and we stayed in a hotel there for a while and enjoyed the city!

Singapore is an amazing city, and very fun to visit.  We're so glad we got a chance to spend some time there as a family.  The contrast entering Singapore from Indonesia is stunning.  On the taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, we were amazed by the nice, three lane highway with no motorcycles on it.  And we were traveling at highway speeds!  The next morning as we stepped out, we were impressed by the clean-ness, all the landscaping, covered walkways, huge sidewalks everywhere, and very good public transportation.  (Not to mention many of the places we miss...like Mcdonalds, Starbucks, Subway, Chillis...etcetera etcetera!)  During our time there we got on the train to visit many of the local sites.   Some of our favorites were the zoo, the botanical gardens, and a park along the beach where you can rent bicycles and ride for miles! Here is a (rather large) album of some pictures we took there.

Link to album for Ipad users

So we really enjoyed Singapore and enjoyed stepping foot back in a place that is more like we are used to. I realized that because Singapore has some advantages over Indonesia in some respects, that doesn't mean that it's better. One thing I really appreciate about Indonesia is how personable many people are here. Often here you can spend time on your front porch (or someone elses front porch) talking with neighbors or strangers. I suppose every place has its strengths and weaknesses! And here in Indonesia, we enjoy some pretty great natural beauty too with the amazing jungles, mountains and beaches! When it was time to leave, Heather and the kids headed on to Missouri to see family. It was hard to say goodbye, and definitely a wierd feeling to say goodbye to your family as they head out on a big trip! And I headed back here to Indonesia to keep flying with MAF (with limited vacation time, it's not really productive for me to go back to the U.S. with them since I would have to leave and return here relatively soon).

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everybody!  We hope you have a good time with family and remembering what God did for you!  Elise enjoyed hearing the Easter story this year in her kids Bible...."Childrens Storybook Bible.". What a blessing it was to see her "follow along" with this story (at least a little bit!)..... and to watch the emotions on her face as Jesus was nailed to the cross....then to watch her delight as he rose from the dead.  Lord may all four of us know and appreciate more deeply what you did for us because you love us!

Our Future Home......Wamena!

This last week was pretty exciting and action packed for us.  We have had a trip to Wamena planned for quite a while now to see another MAF base in Papua and get the flavor of what it is like.  And two days before we left to visit Wamena, we found out that we will be living there....our permenant base assignment!  This is news we have been waiting for for some time so this was a really big deal for us!  It will be our first "place to call home" where we don't have to move again soon.  And we're very ready for that!  So this news turned a normal trip into something much more exciting for us....seeing our future home!

So we flew up on Wednesday on an MAF plane.  Our friend Daniel picked us up and drove us around town a little bit.  We stayed on the MAF base in the guest house where all 10 MAF Wamena families live.  Wamena is situated at 5000 feet in a valley surrounded by huge mountains, and the scenery and the cool air were quite a treat!

Just after landing in Wamena....both Elise and Ian slept on the flight so they were in their funny (but pleasant) just woke up moods when we got there.

Wamena is right in the middle of Papua in the central highlands.  There are no roads that go to Wamena, and obviously no sea ports....so if I understand right, Wamena is the only city in the world supplied entirely by airplanes......

So there you have it, an MAF airplane in the foreground, "watching" the Boeing 737 in the background getting ready to take off...... one of the dozens of cargo flights that comes and goes between Wamena and Sentani (our current home) every day. While the cargo planes supply the city of Wamena, we (MAF) are there to go between Wamena and the many interior mountain villages....to serve the people and ministries there ....for sure I will be sharing much more about that later!  

Instead of saying anything more, I want to share an album of some of the pictures we took on our trip this weekend.  It starts with pictures of the flight out to Wamena.  Believe it or not it was Heather, Elise and Ian's very first time on an MAF flight!  After the flight there's some pictures of Wamena as well as around the MAF base there (where we will live!).  Then I end with pictures from the flight home and approaching our scenic current home (Sentani)......

Smells like Jesus?

This blog post will sort of break tradition with normal posts on here...no pictures of Elise and Ian, stories or pictures of flying in Papua.  I had a realization today I wanted to share (for whatever its worth)...I will get to it in a minute.

I remember when our daughter Elise was born, two weeks before Christmas in 2008.  I remember how helpless she was.....and how dependant on us for everything.  With all that imagining that goes on around Christmas of what it was like for God to come in to the world as a baby, it added "color" to my imaginings.  I remember after changing a handful of diapers one day having the jaw-dropping realization "wow....Jesus had to have his diapers changed."  Im sure it wasnt Huggies or Mamy Poko (Indonesian brand we use now)...but his parents surely had to do something about it.

Ive been reading a book by John Eldredge called "Beautiful Outlaw" about the humanity of Jesus and about his personality as far as we can tell in the Bible.....about his playfulness, sense of humor, and just "human-ness".  There's more in there about that than you would think.  John points out that we have a natural tendency to not think about Jesus' humanity, that he struggled with alot of the illnesses, emotions, and trials that people go through.  We tend to "stain glass window-ize" him. And we dont see his personality that sticks out at times in the Bible that would help endear us to him if we recognized it.

So today as I was reading the book, I was exercising on the elliptical.  Heather came in and said  (pardon the crudeness here) "man, you smell!"  "You mean B.O.?" I replied.  "Yeah."  (no big surprise...I was working out).  That got me thinking about the distinct smell of body odor that I often smell around Papuans, especially those that live in interior villages.  There is no mistaking it, in every village, you are greeted by a very strong smell of the B.O. nature.  Sometimes it can be almost overwhelming.

It makes sense though doesn't it.  They live in jungle isolated from civilization, no roads in.  So they're not using degree antipersperant, old spice, axe, etc.  Don't really have it available.  And the last I checked...they werent having us fly it in for them.  Not a big priority to them.  We're flying a lot more food items on a lot of these flights, like rice, "Mie" (noodles), live pigs, sometimes eggs.  "Keperluan kehidupan"....the "needs of life."  No deoderant that Ive seen yet.  And its easy to see why its not a priority for them.  And As I learned by working on a forest fire crew quite some time ago, after you and the people around you haven't bathed for a couple weeks (and youve been doing hot sweaty dirty work the whole time), the smell sort of just "goes away" (or our noses get used to it).  I remember the looks on the faces of the folks in a Tucson cafe as we came in there after two weeks straight working in the woods without a shower...it seemed very clear  by the looks on their faces that the smell had not "gone away".

So then it hit me on the eliptical......wait a minute!  Did Jesus smell like Papuans?  I can be sure he didnt have access to deoderant as we know it here.  Maybe im not keen on the bathing/soap habits of first century Jerusalem/Israel, but Im willing to bet they smelled a little bit.  Jesus spent a lot of time with his disciples in remote places, and on long journeys.  I would imagine the smell increased at those points.

So wait a minute what's the point here anyways?  Jesus smelled?  Is that worth writing down on your blog?  I thought it was really cool to make this association and realize that when I get off the airplane in the interior and are greeted by a group of locals, that un-pleasant smell that accompanies them might be the same among Jesus and his disciples!  Maybe it's the smell of Jesus!

Also, in this book by John Eldredge, as I learn things like this, I am realizing more and more how Jesus identified with us in many many ways.  It wasn't, as John says, Albert Einstein coming down to add 2 plus 2.  Or Lebron James coming to the Y to play a pick up game.   It wasnt easy for Jesus.  He felt things, like grief, empathy, compassion, and maybe fear.  He experienced temptations that we experience (though he never gave in).  Like it explains in Philippians 2, though he was God, he laid his privileges aside and became a servant while he was here.  He was fully human  like it says in Hebrews.....Jesus is our "high priest" who is able to empathize with our weaknesses......because he experienced them too!

Happy Birthday Heather!

As I write this....we are in the middle of an amazing tropical downpour.  It's been raining hard already for a couple hours, with occasional thunder and lightning.  Rain storms out here are amazing for sure and back home in the states there really is no comparison!  We dont get any strong winds and hail like back home, but the rain is amazing.  My friend/neighbor Jon said their trash cans were set out in their yard empty the other day.  It rained hard that night, and the next morning their trash cans were full to the brim with water.  Wow!

With this blog entry I'm "breaking the blog silence!"  I know we havent posted many blog entries lately (I guess by we I mean I, since I am the one that usually does it!).  Part of the reason is we had a really busy (and wonderful) January....with Heathers parents visiting almost the entire month.  We had such a great time with them.  I want to do a blog entry with some pictures from that, but there is something more pressing today.

A very special lady is having a birthday tomorrow!.....(March 2).  So here's a few recent pictures of her....

At the beach

Doing her best Southern Bell impression in the kitchen

With her son

Reading to the kiddos...a night time ritual

On an evening stroll on the airport ramp

And with her family

Elise, Ian and I love you so much Heather!  You're such a loving and wonderful mom and wife, you make us all smile ;<)

I was sitting with a handful of Indonesian and western MAF staff at our quarterly "day of prayer" when the name of a particular couple came up, Wes and Esther.  One of the staff members (we were meeting in his office) reached over and grabbed a letter sent to him by Wes and Esther.  It was a thank you for helping to arrange the shipment of some eggs, along with a few other things.  Wes and Esther are missionaries living in an interior village called Mammitt.  They are the only missionaries in their neck of the woods.  In their small village, they have a bible school to help train native pastors.  Wes oversees that school, and every day Esther provides childcare for and teaches (by herself) thirty or forty children of those Papuan bible students.  As I listened to several different staff talk about Wes and Esther I could tell that they held a special place in their hearts.  When they receive food from us on an MAF flight, they keep very little for themselves.  They end up distributing the majority of it to those who really need it.  They are definitely an example of Christ to the people they are ministering to in love and selflessness.

A few weeks ago my life intersected (very briefly) with Wes and Esther.  During my training process, we brought some people into their village, then stayed about an hour to do some takeoffs and landings for practice.  Their airstrip is one of the more "docile" places that I will be flying to when I am first approved to fly solo.  The length and width of the strip, and the slope help add to its "margin" making it a more forgiving place for us new guys to cut our teeth at.   As we were "turning the plane around"  and I was "limbering up" to go install some seats for our next leg, I briefly met them and snapped a quick picture.

Esther, Wes, and my instructor pilot David on the right

So that's typical of my life right in this season of service with MAF.  Just a quick hello, keeping my nose to the grindstone.  I have so much to learn about our daily flight operations, that my time and attention are directed that way.  Some day down the road when I have everything "down pat" a little bit better, I look forward to connecting more with people like Wes and Esther and the people they serve.

There's something exciting coming up in Mamitt this next week.  It is sort of the "buzz" in our little community here in Sentani right now.  MAF is flying  group of high school kids to Mammitt for a little longer than a week, and Wes and Esther will be hosting them.  These kids attend the local "international school" and many of them have parents who are missionaries in other parts of this island or Indonesia.  This is such an exciting opportunity!  To think about what the Lord is going to do in the lives of both the high schoolers and the people of Mammitt as they are encouarged mutually by eachothers faith and way of life.