On November 10th at 4pm our airplane’s paperwork was approved in Manila and we had a flying flight program again! At 4:45pm the same afternoon in Mindanao, I did my first practice flight in order to get current again after over two months of not flying. It has been 13 days since that time and I have had 10 flight days (with more than one flight on most days), 13 supply/passenger flights 19 flight hours, and 87 landings. I flew 38 passengers and 8,151 pounds of groceries, generators, printers and printing materials and other needed supplies.
The airplane was finished just in time for us to be able to help facilitate a translation check on the book of Exodus for the Tala-Andig tribe. A team had assembled with folks from New Zealand, Australia, Philippines, United States, and the Faeroe Islands to go over every part of the book of Exodus to check it’s accuracy in the Tala-Andig language. As a result, the church in the Tala-Andig tribe now has another portion of scripture in their language. We were thrilled to provide some of the logistical transportation support for that project.
Another tribal church has been working hard with what scriptures they presently have. However, their translation of the Bible is far from finished and the missionaries came back from furlough for a few weeks to help develop teaching materials, print lessons and translate more of the Bible into the tribal language. The missionaries have been working from Australia on the translation, but have returned to encourage the believers and supply them with some more materials. When they arrived in the tribe it had been nearly a year since they had lived there and nothing in their houses was working properly.
They had to reclaim their home from the snakes, mice and spiders the size of mice that had taken up residency there. They were also without electricity until we could fly a generator and a hydro-electric generator into the tribe. Their batteries which run the household electricity from solar panels were all dead along with two generators. Our handy little Honda generator that was so kindly purchased for us months ago is now being loaned to them to run computers, printers and other electronics required for printing these materials. It is the perfect little generator for this project. We expect to fly back to this project a few more times to provide support for the missionaries who are working long hours to get as many printed materials into the hands of the tribal church leaders there.
Thanks so much for all of your prayers for us during this time. God worked so many things out for us to be ready for this crazy push. While I’ve been gone 12-16 hours a day Bailey has had to watch a two-year old and a 6 month old and keep track of weather, airstrip conditions and track the airplane via a combination of Skype, SMS, email and HF radio. She can’t leave the radio until I am on the ground so there have been some long, long days for her.
Thanks for praying. It is exciting to see all that God is doing here on Mindanao and to be a part of making these kinds of projects possible.