Thank you so much for your prayers for the emergency flight yesterday. Ben and Garry were able to take off early in the morning and encountered only minor rain showers along the way. They said the airstrip was quite slippery, but still well within our minimum requirements. They took Isol out of the tribe and got him to a nearby town where he was taken to the hospital. The missionary team did a fantastic job of cleaning him up and preparing him for the flight out. He did continue to pass out periodically but had stabilized and should be in good hands now.
Thank you for all your prayers surrounding this flight. When we received the call I was reassembling the airplane after the inspection while Ben and Garry worked on the paperwork. Ben came over to the plane with a sheepish smile on his face and said, “How soon can this plane be flying again? A man in the tribe has stepped on a pig trap and…”
I thought it was a joke to get me all worked up. They always did that sort of thing in my training to “simulate” the pressure one might feel to get the job done in a safe way and make decisions to accomplish the imminent without creating a new iminent emergency. I didn’t know Ben well enough yet to know if he was joking or serious because the story was pretty elaborate. He was serious, and it was for real.
We quickly gathered our thoughts and evaluated the status of the airplane. There were many decisions to make in a very short time about what was left to repair and what was still disassembled. It is in those times that we are so thankful for a team of prayer partners who we know are praying for us everyday. The Lord really led us earlier in the day to avoid starting some of the larger, deferrable projects on the airplane and to focus on the more minor things first. It was this decision that kept us from opening up the fuel system and making it near impossible to get the airplane flying again in time for the early morning flight.
Bailey and I are going back to Manila today to work on some paperwork for my pilot and mechanic licenses and to ship our things. There are several other adminisrative tasks we are going to work through in the next couple weeks. We will return to Palawan for another three weeks after that to finish some the larger preventative aircraft projects that we postponed. Thank you so much for all your prayers for us as a team here. God is working and leading us even when we don’t feel it. Thanks so much!