Wow.   Made it.  The last month has been a huge race against time.  We’ve been very busy flying and I’ve been going crazy trying to get Arua ready to base a plane.  On that front I succeeded about as well as I’d hoped…fuel container is in place, we have a house there, and only a little work to do on it before it’s ready to move into.

Flying has been challenging.  More to the point, the officials in congo have been incredibly difficult.  One of our planes was delayed overnight by the officials questioning paperwork (cadging for money really), another of our pilots was harassed for a couple hours, and when Kinshasa was called the local officials were asked, essentially, “what in heck are you harassing this guy for?”  I spent two weeks flying in Sudan, from Juba.  That went pretty smoothly once I got out of Juba. It’d be nice if you could understand the guy in the tower.  Hemumblesandslurseverythingtogether.  You know it’s bad when the African pilots are asking him to repeat things because they can’t understand him.  Oh, and it was 105 degrees IN THE SHADE  in Doro where I spent an overnight. On the plus side, I had a great time flying.  We’re helping feed the hungry, and we’re enabling the preaching of the gospel in places that you just can’t get to without an airplane.

I’m also looking at all the furor over Invisible Children.  Yes, we have flown them.  We do not financially support them…in fact they pay us for the use of the airplane.  I don’t understand what all the fuss is about.  The situation is NOT complicated.  Yes it’s more detailed than their half hour video portrays, but what do you expect from a video?  However, the situation really is quite simple.  The LRA and its leader Kony are evil.  Good men should  take steps to stop them…the LRA has prospered quite long enough. The full solution will not be simple, granted…destruction is always simpler than healing, but the first step is stopping the LRA.

But, for me, that’s in a few months.  We’re all in the US on home assignment now.  Time to rest, visit family, do some recurrency training, visit friends, tell our churches and supporters what we’re about.  Lots of driving ahead: NC, MA, NC, VA, OH, NE, AL and probably a few other states.  I’m looking forward to it.

We’re in the new year and off to the races, as it were.  Last week I spent in Nairobi getting my Kenya pilot license and instrument rating renewed and doing some training for AIM Air. Monday and Tuesday I’m flying in Congo and on Wednesday Ron P. takes the plane to Central Africa for several days.  The week after I’m in Sudan and Congo again, and the week after that there are flights to Sudan.  So…lots of flying.   We also have some airplane parts stuck in customs which I have to get unstuck, I hope, and there are a number of details of program administration which need to be dealt with now that the holidays are over and the Uganda Civil Aviation Authorities guys are all back to work.

The two big items coming up for this year of our Lord, 2012 are home assignment (aka furlough) and a move.  We’ll be going to the US for home assignment from early April through mid- July this year.  April we’ll spend seeing family and the rest of the time we’ll spend visiting churches and re-acquainting ourselves with our supporters.  And raising some more support.  Our financial needs have increased rather dramatically with the move to Uganda last year.  And Beth will be starting at Rift Valley Academy (RVA) for 9th grade when we get back.  More tuition to pay.

The UN has made their base in Entebbe permanent, and has declared it “family friendly” all of which means that they will be renting lots of houses around here.  Thus, all the rents have gone up drastically.  Our own rent went from $400 to $800 and the land lord wants $1000 per month.  Thus, we have to move again.  This will be our 8th move since coming to Africa.  AIM Air has been trying to establish a base in Arua, up in NW Uganda.  Since we have to move we figured we’d make the move worthwhile and get the Arua base started.  Susan and I went up to Arua house hunting back in early December and found a house.  We (AIM really) have a lease on it and we will be moving into it as soon as we get back from the US.  This also means I have to get the house ready (install solar power and hot water mainly) and on the AIM Air side, I have to get a shipping container installed at the airport so that we can store fuel there.  I will also be working with the Uganda CAA to get a site for a hangar and then I’ll oversee the construction of the hangar, and of course set up the AIM Air Uganda office in a new location.

Arua puts the airplane about 200 miles closer to everywhere we go, as compared to Entebbe, thus potentially saving the missionaries we serve considerable $$.  It’s going to be a significant amount of work to get the base up and running but the pay off in terms of enabling missionaries to get to remote places is huge.  AIM has two families interested in eastern CAR, and having the plane in Arua reduces the response time in event of an emergency from four hours to two and a half hours, and reduces the cost of a flight by over $1500.  Maybe with this in place we’ll get more than two families out into CAR, and maybe more missionary families out into Sudan and Congo as well.

Here are a few highlights from 2011:

Visiting with the Mbororo as part of  a survey trip in February to look at sending missionaries to reach this people group.  The Mbororo are part of the Fulani, a largely folk-muslim group of about 6 million people who are totally unreached by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  The hope is that the missionaries will do a two-prong approach. One team will work with strengthening the local church in CAR and helping them to reach the Mbororo.  The other missionary team will work directly with the Mbororo.

Of course not all the flights went smoothly.  I got severely stuck in the mud in Daga Post (Sudan).  The  Caravan is a great airplane, however no airplane is really all that good when it comes to mud.  It took me and about 50 local people about two hours to get the plane out of the mud.  I don’t even want to talk about the flat tire I had in Unity (Sudan) in the midst of doing food deliveries for the refugees at Yida.

I also got to help set up the first food deliveries (drops) at Yida. I flew in two quad bikes to Kienger so that the SP folks could get to Yida and set up the drop zone, and did scouting for the DC-3 in preparation for the drops.  And I got to see the first bags of food leave the DC-3 and hit the ground.  All that’s talked about in Lentil Delivery.  There was also an evacuation from Kurmuk and Yabus, and later I got to pick up patients for a cleft-palate clinic Samaritan’s Purse had set up.

Susan was having some adventures of her own.  One of our guards landed in jail and she got to set up getting him help.  And more cheerful (and more work) another of our guard’s wife had their first baby back in September, and Susan helped all through that process, including dealing with the classically confused/stunned new father.

The year of our Lord 2011 was a good year.  I pray that 2012 will be also and that He will be glorified throughout the year.

One of the bits of advice we got when we were new missionaries was “don’t give a laundry list of what you’ve done in your newsletters, tell stories.”  Great advice, since everyone loves a good story.  I’m just not sure which story to tell at the moment.

There’s the story about a flat tire on the Caravan at Unity airstrip and getting it changed while under attack by tsetse flies.  Or there’s being in Kajo Keji to watch the formation of a new Conference of the Baptist church, over 100 churches where the missionaries here thought there might be 20.  Another story would be one I’ve already mentioned in my post called “Lentil Delivery.”  Though now it’s mostly sorghum (all the airplanes smell like molasses) we’re hauling to feed over 20,000 people who have fled attacks in North Sudan.  Or I could tell about the 5 gallon jug of honey from Banda in Congo that spilled in the back of the airplane. I could talk about the pastors we carried to and from a conference for encouraging defections and returns from the  LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army).

On the more challenging side of things there’s the story about why we’re moving again (to Arua this time), or the health scare Susan had last week. There’s also the story of all the flying we’ve been doing…over 140 flight hours for Ron Pontier and I last month and over 520 hours for AIM Air…which is twice what we were doing at the start of the year.

There’s one constant in all these stories though, and that’s God.  He has been in control and has seen us through, and it’s His glory that all the stories are about in the end.  Susan and the kids and I just get the fun part of seeing them unfold from the inside. Sometimes it’s more fun that other times, of course. Some of the stories are scary, some are funny, some are inspiring.  All are about God in the end.

So this post isn’t really about a story. It’s just a teaser to get you to come back and see what the next story is.

We get to do these from time to time, though we wish we didn’t.  I’d flown in Congo earlier in the week for Samaritan’s Purse, hitting the usual spots of Banda and Faradje, then overnight in Bunia, and then taking the airplane to Lokichogio, Kenya, to fill in.  We’re down one Caravan at the moment due to engine difficulties, so the two flying are swapping around quite a bit.   I flew from Loki up to Longchuk, where I got stuck in the mud.  Trying to dig and pull a Caravan out of the mud is quite a chore, let me tell you.  Fortunately I had about 50 helpers.  I rigged cargo straps around the main wheel hubs and we put about 20 people on each strap, and pulled.  An hour of digging and pulling later, the plane was on solid ground again.  That’s my “pit crew” there in the picture, and the mud covered pilot off to the side.

After getting unstuck I headed back to Lokichogio for the night. I expected to spend the next day doing paperwork while waiting for a flight down to Nairobi.  Wrong.  A bit after 5am Jon Hildebrandt woke me up (our visiting pilot quarters are the Loki program office, next to his house).  New plan, we’re going to Sudan to pull Samaritan’s Purse and SIM missionaries out of the area of fighting that flared up in the night.  So, off we went.

Jon flew the plane, I handled the radios.  On the ground at our first pickup Jon kept the engine turning while I went out the back and got the passengers on board.  Two minutes on the ground to load 6 adults and one infant. Not bad.  Then it’s off to the next spot to get the SIM guy.  Same drill.  One minute on the ground this time.

Airborne again we started for Loki.  A bit less than 10 minutes later we got a call on the radio…”Run a parallel course and standby, we might have you go back and pick the others out of that last spot.”  A few minutes later it was “Head for (a nearby mission station) and fuel and wait while we coordinate.”  So we went there and waited.  I talked with AIM Air ops on the phone once there and we started making plans to go back and pick up two more missionaries.  Here’s their recap of the events (edited for names):

“Greetings from Nairobi. Here is a brief account of our evacuation.
Yesterday, God has once again shown his great love and faithfulness to people like me and my wife despite uncountable shortcomings that we have, for which, we thank God and praise him with all our hearts, may his name be glorified. In the morning as we were busy doing our own works, news came about a town, the next town from our station that there was problem and the missionaries would be evacuated from there, so W, our dear missionary friend also got ready to go by that same flight since he is going to America. But we were not ready to go because the bombing was in that town not in ours. However, as soon as the flight took off from our airstrip within a minute a plane came in and bombed the airstrip area two times. When we heard the sound everyone ran to different directions like frightened animals, trying to hide in the bushes holding grab-and-run bags. While running I prayed, Lord, please look at us and do what is best for us.

God did not fail us; He protected us and brought us safely to Nairobi. And I know that all these are possible because of your sincere prayer and tears. Thank you so much may God bless you all. We still want to request you to pray for our fellow workers, the teachers and staff left behind in our town, for God’s protection and help. Our hearts pain when we think of them. Please, please pray for them for their safety. For everything, we really thank God and thank you, the authority of SIM, Chris and all the staffs in Nairobi, different SIM bases and SIMNEI for your concern, love and prayer. May God bless you. Also we thank all our supporters and friends for constant prayer and support
Thank you
God be praised
H & R

In short, we went back and picked up H and R.  We left our other evacuees where we fueled and once we’d gotten H and R we went back and picked every one up and went to Lokichogio.

The flights, as far as the flying went, were routine.  As far as the reason and situation around the flights, those things were tense.  As far as serving brothers and sisters in Christ were a huge privilege.  To God be the glory.

It used to be that the refugees from the Nuba mountains who had fled to South Sudan’s Unity state had only seen bombs falling from airplanes.  On Sunday the 8th of August they saw lentils, sorghum, beans, and rice fall.   It was really exciting to be a part of getting that food to them.  I wasn’t on the DC-3 shown here (the picture is from Samaritan’s Purse).  I was flying one of AIM Air’s caravans in support of the airdrop, taking Samaritan’s Purse workers to the airstrip nearest to the refugees, along with two quad bikes, several drums of fuel, tents and other supplies.  The airstrip was only 9 miles from the refugees, but it was still about a 5 hour ride on the quad since the “road” was mostly under water. 

I’d started in Congo on the 2nd, a fairly routine flight (and it sounds strange to say a flight into Congo is routine).  On Friday we started working on the food drops. I flew from Aru to Bunia and traded airplanes with another of our pilots. He finished my flight on Satuday, while I flew to Juba, Sudan. Saturday I took a load of food up to Unity state to start helping set things up for the air drops.   Sunday the first drops began as the DC-3 arrived.  We loaded it with almost three tons of food and a pallet of plastic sheeting for shelters.  Meanwhile I flew out with the deputy governor of the state, the assemblyman, and the minister of roads for the state to survey the roads and the drop zone.  We watched from a mile or so away when the DC-3 arrived, and dropped the first load of food.

The airstrip I was flying into wasn’t as bad off as the road, but it was still pretty mucky.  The SP guys kept laughing and saying you could even go four-wheeling in an airplane.  It took all day today to get the airplane clean. 

Normally we don’t fly on Sunday.  Christ asked in Matthew 12:11 : “Then He said to them, “What man is there among you who has one sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out?  Of how much more value then is a man than a sheep? Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”   It was exciting to be part of doing good on the Sabbath.

Please pray for the refugees.  Pray also for the people still in the Nuba mountains. We learned this morning that the government of north Sudan had resumed bombing.

It is, perhaps, unwise to write a blog entry late at night, but I’ll attempt it anyway.  Please forgive any typos…

I was reading another missionary’s blog and he wrote in it about being asked what was his best day, and his answer, after some reflection and looking back at the stories in his blog were that there were quite alot of candidates for “best day.”  I find myself in agreement.  Even my recent misadventures with flat tires in the Central African Republic qualify.  That was possibly one of the most difficult trips I’ve had, but it was successful in that I was able to get my passengers where they needed to be on time, and most importantly, safely.

A trip a bit before that is another candidate, and one that I’ve been meaning to write about for a couple weeks. I’ve been too busy flying that last three weeks to write about anything until now, other than the quick post about flat tires.  The first weekend of July I was up in Mundri, South Sudan for the weekend. On the 1st I picked some people from World Gospel Mission in Arua and flew them to Mundri to attend the ordination of Steven Dokolo as the new bishop for the Anglican church in that part of Sudan.  One of the missionaries had served there in Mundri for about 10 years during the war.  He told stories about hunkering down in the Bible school he taught at while the school was bombed.  He told about the northerners taking the roofs off the buildings of the school and the church so that the buildings would collapse. And he told about how no one was hurt during the bombings and we saw that all those buildings were still standing. Despite the efforts I’ve mentioned, and many others, God’s church, not only survived the war but grew.

Another story he told as we stood outside the cross built into the school chapel’s wall, how an artist designed the windows of the building, and the cross in the wall. I wish I had a picture of it. The cross is broken, representing Jesus being broken for us.  Hearing the gospel mentioned, even so casually as part of a story, in that setting, under that cross which had withstood the war was a tremendous reminder of the sort of God we serve.  Paul writes in Romans 8:31 through the end of the chapter:  What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?  He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?   Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: “For Your sake we are killed all day long, we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”  Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.  For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Lots of best days.  I look forward to the next one.

Airplanes get them too.  My last day working for Suburban Air Freight in Omaha, in fact, I got to fix a flat tire on a Caravan at Omaha’s Epply airport, in the freezing cold. It was early December 2006, and in the single digits Fahrenheit.  I had to get in the truck every few minutes to warm my hands back up.

The flat tire I had last week in Obo C.A.R. was, possibly worse.  We eventually got it fixed, but it was almost a $1500 event.  In the process of patching the tube, which had developed a hole right at the base of the valve stem, I removed and replaced the tire something like 4 times.  After getting the tire patched, I flew back to Zemio (where we enter and exit the country).  AIM Air used to have a plane based there in Zemio, and so we still have some supplies. Including a new old-stock tire and tube of the right size!  So I replaced the tube, changing the tire yet again.

Practice does make perfect. Or at least faster.  The first tire change took me about 45 minutes.  The last one took about 15, not including working the little bicycle pump we use to inflate the tire. The last tire change in Obo took place during a rain storm, I should add.  I got filthy.  Just ’cause it’s an airplane doesn’t mean you stay clean.

If we, and I say we because I was talking to the maintenance department back in Nairobi getting advice on the issue, hadn’t been able to get the tube fixed, the next option was to fly one up.  Thus the $1500 event.  Fortunately, we didn’t have to.

Other than the tire, the trip went smoothly. The tire was quite adventure enough.

Nyamibungu and Kamituga are towns in DR Congo where we’re going to pick up some Norwegian missionaries.  The discussion of the names in the hangar the other day was very amusing with several of us tripping over the pronunciation, confusing the two of them and mixing other places in… “We’re going from Entebbe to Bukavu to Nyamibungu, shuttle to Bukavu and then out to Kigali…” Say all that in one breath and with a straight face. I dare you.

The area around Nyamibungu is a mining area. It’s also infested with the Mai Mai and the Interahamwe, two gangs of thugs remainging from the wars in Congo and the Rwandan genocide, respectively.  One mission group we work with has been waiting for some months to get some sawmills set up in that area, but has been unable to move the equipment out of Bukavu due to insecurity in the area, primarily due to those two groups.

Which leads me to the conclusion that in general Congo is depressing. They have everything they need to be prosperous…lots of people, lots of resources, plenty of space and fertile ground for crops.  But they are cursed with a disfunctional government, tribalism, and animism.

It seems impossible. And in fact is impossible, with solely human resources. Only in Christ, the Prince of peace, is there an answer big enough for the problems of Congo.  Only He can change the hearts of government officials so that they enforce and follow law rather than fill their own pockets, only He can turn the Interahamwe and Mai Mai from violence, only He can free the people from their beliefs in spirits and ancestor worship and the curse of tribalism (read racism).  Matthew 9:36-38 “But when He saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd.  Then He said to His disciples, “The harvest truly is plentiful, but the laborers are few.  Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.”  Congo needs those workers.

Is change.  Or at least that’s what I hear, and it seems to be true enough in our case.  The biggest recent change is that we’ve moved.  Yep, we’re no longer in Nairobi, Kenya.  Now we’re in Entebbe, Uganda.

We moved via airplane. So far we’ve had 3 caravan loads of stuff come over, though two of those were partial loads since the airplane was full of seats, and we ran out of room to put things.  The first load was a full one, and Brian Staples, the pilot who was on the trip with me was making unkind comparisons of our airplane with the Clampetts’ truck.  All it needed, he said, was a rocking chair ratchet strapped to the top of the fuselage.

We still have more change awaiting us.  We’re not in our own house but rather in another family’s house, which is still full of their things.  So we’re crammed in with boxes and furniture stacked everywhere we can find to stack it.  We have a plan for a permanent house, or as permanent as anything in missions is, and should move into our own place around the end of May.

Entebbe is a big change from Nairobi.  We have a yard, instead of a postage stamp!  There’s actually room to turn around and room to set up  a shop and to have a garden and …  The traffic is a LOT lighter, and when it is heavy it’s orderly!  I’ve made the trek to Kampala once already, and it went well. The traffic was heavy, but they all followed the road rules!  Amazing!

So far the girls are taking the move in-stride. It helps that the Fowlers are here.  Leo and Menda have 8 kids (adopted), and all about Beth and Samantha’s age.  So the girls are having a great time.

Alex is home on term break from RVA, another change.  Both having him away and now having him back.

So…change is, well, constant.

There is a relation between the items in the title of this blog post.  I will grant that it’s not an obvious one.

From 3 – 11 February Ron Pontier and I flew around Congo and CAR taking a group of four Congolese pastors and four missionaries to visit the churches among the Zande tribe.  The idea of the trip was two-fold. One was to encourage the church among the Zande.  Two of the pastors were Kokole and Lalima, the president and vice-president respectively of the Africa Inland Church in Congo.  Both are very godly men who well deserve the respect they are held in.  The greetings they received!  Wow!  We had parades and church services and food and ….

I began to get an inkling on this trip what hospitality really is.  When we arrived in Banda, our first stop, we’d been told to expect the accommodations to be rough.  Not so.  Primitive, yes. I was in a mud hut, but they gave us their very best.  Ron and I stayed with one of the district pastors (an administrative post) in Banda.  We had the best beds and hut that they had. It even had an electric light!  And the food…wow.  Alot of African families can’t afford to have more than one meal a day.  We were fed three good meals every day.  With meat even at lunch and dinner.

The church services to welcome the guests often ran two hours.  And everyone got up to sing.  The women’s choir, the men’s choir, the secondary school, the primary school, the Bible school….the songs were hymns or traditional welcome songs, or a mix of both.  We all had the Zande greetings down by the end of the trip, since we had to get up and introduce ourselves and greet the church at every stop.

The Bible tells us “be hospitable.”  The Zande go all out.

That first reason for the trip was an unqualified success.  Pastors Kokole and Lalima greatly encouraged the churches we visited.  We heard at every stop, too, how grateful the church people were to see missionaries, how glad they were we had come to see them and how it encouraged them to know that we have seen their situation and are praying for them.

Despite the hospitality, things are difficult for the church there.  Syncretism is a huge problem. There is a lot of hold-over of traditional animistic beliefs among the church there.  Their lives are difficult. Jobs are almost no-existent.  They can no longer work their gardens for the most part, as they are forced to stay close to town because of the LRA (Lords Resistance Army), and so food is hard to get, and they no longer have cash crops to sell at market.  The pastor we stayed with told how when the LRA raided Banda about 18 months ago he fled into the bush and hid for three days with his family.  Others told us how they are afraid to travel because of the LRA.  In Dungu we were told how the LRA raided the edge of the old mission station (now the church’s station) and took several captives and made them work as slaves for several days before releasing them.  And how the UN, even though the LRA marched right past their base, did nothing.

Please pray for the Zande church!  Pray for them to get good training in the Bible and theology to combat the syncretism that is so prevelant, pray that the LRA will be stopped, and that the Zande will be able to live without fearing their raids.

The other purpose of the trip was for the missionaries with us to look at the Zande church and the Mbororo. The Mbororo are the largest group of semi-nomadic herdsman that make up the Fulani people.  The Fulani spread from Niger to Ethiopia and number some 6 million people.  Their belief system is folk-islam, a mix of animism and islam.  For the past thirty years or so the Mbororo have been slowly moving into Zande lands.  The missionaries have the idea of working with the Zande church to reach the Mbororo.

So…we went to meet with the Mbororo.  In Banda it was a bit tense, and the Mbororo did not receive us well, and the Zande were reluctant to take us. The Mbororo are not well liked by the Zande whose gardens the Mbororo cattle often get in and spoil.  The Zande also fear the Mbororo will take their lands and drive them out.  In Zemio and in Mboki, our two stops in CAR, the Mbororo were much more approachable, and welcomed us into their camps.  We had a long talk with the chief in Zemio, and he told us not only did he want to stop moving, but that his people need God’s word! Talk about an open door for the gospel!

This open door did not happen overnight.  Jean-Baptiste, a Zande pastor, has been working with the Mbororo for the last several years around Zemio, and is well known to them there.   Please pray for Jean-Baptiste.  He has had a very hard life.  His daughter is in need of long-term medical care, and he often feels very discouraged because he sees so little progress in his work.  We prayed with him our last night in Zemio, on the way out, and he was in tears as the missionaries and Kokole and Lalima prayed for him.  Pray for encouragement and support for Jean-Baptiste.  The work he is called to is huge…bigger than a man, or a mission.  Only God is enough to accomplish this work.  He chooses to use us as His instruments in the work, but sometimes we are used up in the work.  Pray for Jean-Baptiste.

It was a humbling trip, seeing the faith of men like Jean-Baptiste, Kokole, and Lalima.  It was humbling to see the scope of the task these other missionaries are contemplating, listening really to see if God is calling them to it.  It was humbling to hear the Mbororo chief tell us that his people need the word of God.

It was also very exciting. In years to come, God willing, we might be able to point to this trip and say we got to see the start of God’s church among the Mbororo.