We were very blessed to have Heather's mom and Stepdad visit over Christmas/new years. Ellen and Dave stayed for three weeks. This time we were a little better prepared with things for them to do. We had a really good time together. I put together a little photo album of some of the things we did, including Elise's princess birthday party...
I used to embed a slideshow in here, but it seems Google has re-done how they do their photos. So until I figure out if its still possible to do that, I will just have to put a link to the photo album:
But if you dont have time to go to that link, here's a couple of my favorites!
We had a great time with Ellen and Dave. It is hard to communicate how meaningful it is when family visits out here! This was Grandma Ellen and Grandpa Dave's fourth trip to Indonesia during this our first overseas term. I heard a friend who's been with MAF much longer indicate that may be some sort of a record!
We have had lots of friends recently remind us that our last blog post was back in August. To those who have frequently checked this blog, a big apology! One reason for that was back in October, I was moved from flight to maintenance with MAF. We have shared with many of you about that in emails and our prayer letter. If this is news to you and you would like to know why, we wrote about it in our last prayer letter (click here)
So the move to maintenance has meant no more flying photos and adventures to share. So my natural urge to blog has been much less. There has been a healing process to go along with this as well that has decreased my urge to blog. But the more I sink my teeth into the privilege of serving as a mechanic with MAF here, the more I would like to blog about it. Maybe not about the bearings I greased or the torque I applied on the nut, but about the awesome things that we see happening around here in and around the ministry of MAF. And of course about our kids!
So thank you to those of you who have sought to find out about us to pray for us, and I will be trying to be more faithful to pass things along here!
Saturday, August 10, 2013
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....
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.
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!
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).
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!
