The main part of our ministry now is to oversee all our operations in the Philippines and to make sure our teams are functioning well and well equipped to serve our missionaries. We have spent all of our time in the southern part of the country and haven’t ventured to our northern operations where we are using a helicopter to serve the tribal church planting teams.
We spent our first week back in the Philippines working on government paperwork in an attempt to have my pilot’s license reissued. Once the paperwork process came to a “hurry-up-and-wait” status we decided to travel as a family to the Northern Philippines and spend a week with our co-workers. It was a great time for us to learn more about how the helicopter program is laid out and what our helicopter team’s needs are. We were also able to catch up with our good friends and spend some quality time together.
A major highlight of this trip was that I flew with Zach Keller into a tribe that I had hiked into when we first arrived here in 2008. That first trip took me and a couple of other missionaries two days of travel and a full day to recover from dehydration and heat exhaustion from the hike. We got to work on the construction projects that we came to do right away, but it still took another 3 days to recover from the blisters and cuts. We all recovered just in time to go home.
In the helicopter the trip took about 30 minutes and we didn’t even break a sweat. It was quite an amazing thing to see how the helicopter is assisting missionaries in the northern Philippine tribes. It was also a neat experience to travel together as a family and no doubt it was a blessing to the wives that Bailey was able to come. We normally can’t afford to travel together, but the Lord provided for us to make this trip as a family. It’s definitely something we’re praying we can do more of in the future as Bailey has so much to offer the other wives that we just don’t want to miss those opportunities.