I am including a few stories from the Flight Journal which is a compilation of anecdotes from the MAF pilots here in Kalimantan. What you will read, is what these guys do on a daily basis. (Sorry about the paragraph formatting - with my limited computer skills that was a challenge I couldn't resolve.)
Flew a full load of PVC pipe into LAY for a community water project that they are starting. This was one of a number of pipe loads that we’ve carried into the village.
Today, Jason and I, Steve, performed two medical flights. We picked up a sick child in the village of Tiang Ohang. Then we went to another village that neither Jason nor I had been to before called Jangkang. In this village was a young father that had fallen off a motorcycle. There are not really any roads there so to speak, so I’m not sure how it happened, but he seemed to have a head injury and had a lot of pain from his chest. I’m assuming it was an internal injury. His wife, young child, and father rode along. I was able to pray with the family before we took off.
By the way, while we were in Jangkang we overheard an interesting conversation by
some of the kids. They were trying to figure out if the airplane was actually real or not. I’m not sure what they thought, maybe since there is such a belief in ghosts and spirits they thought the airplane might not be really physically there. At any rate, they had to touch the airplane to be really sure. After that conversation they began discussing how pointy my nose is.
Today I, Steve, was able to carry the Indonesian pastor of a GKII/ CMA church plant
here in PalangkaRaya to a village about 120 miles away for a Christmas celebration.
The village also has a small GKII church, but this pastor told me this morning how the people of this village are still deep into their ancient animistic beliefs and want little to do with Christianity. This pastor also told me that alcohol is pretty rampant in this tiny little village. I was also able to carry in about 10 live full size chickens into this village to help them celebrate Christmas.
Today, I also moved all of a family’s possessions from one village to another. They
will be moving to this other village, but there was not room in the airplane for both their possessions and their family, so the family plans to go on a later date. The interesting thing is that all these peoples belongings only took up about a third of thecapacity of the airplane. I tend to bring more than that back from the capital city whenever I go.
