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....