We have a couple of fun announcements for you today! The first is that we will be home in Iowa for Christmas! Although our first furlough is not scheduled until a year from now, our time here in language school will be complete the week before Christmas and MAF is sending Alex to Spokane for some simulator training on the new aircraft he will be flying. With a new baby, a new move and the holidays MAF was gracious enough to send the whole family back together. We will have a couple weeks of vacation time there before Alex heads off to training in Washington and Idaho for a couple of weeks, then we will all return to Indonesia to meet our new home in Papua at the end of January. Unfortunately the nature of this trip doesn't leave us with much time to meet with many of you. But we hope to at least see many of you at church and say hello! Announcement number two: Last weekend we were officially assigned to the base where we will move when Alex's flight and maintenance training is complete roughly a year from now. Drum roll please... We have been assigned to the MAF base in Nabire! This is a port town that serves the villages throughout north central Papua. There will be just one other MAF family there, so out Indonesian language skills will certainly be stretched. We are pretty excited that we will live right next to the ocean. You can look forward to hearing more about what our lives there will be like in time, but for the upcoming year we will be on the main base of Sentani, near the city of Jayapura, while Alex works through his in country flight and maintenance training in the Kodiak. We are excited for the time that we will spend there, as it will be the place and people we come back to for resources and support for our life in Nabire. Here are a few pictures of Nabire that or future teammates graciously sent us! Prayer Requests: Finishing up life here in Salatiga well
Getting Ben's passport in time, and international travels with two littles in tow Blessings for our time in Iowa Alex starting the next phase of his training (he hasn't flown in quite awhile) And grace as we start over in a new place and culture again
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With the recent Tsunami on the island of Sulawesi, several of you have reached out to us to see how we are doing. We appreciate your concern. Here in Salatiga we are not close to where the Tsunami hit. And still being in language school, we are not involved in relief efforts. MAF is however. Our coworkers have boots on the ground there this week doing areal survey flights and bringing in aid. They are working with Ethnos 360 and Samaritan's Purse, among others, to determine what the immediate needs are and to help get them met. Yesterday they flew south from the epicenter. One Pilot observed, "Today, going south, that road is gone. There are areas that are liquefied that make no sense to me. Then we get to this village of 5,000 people, totally cut off from the rest of the world unless they hike out four days, and they’re looking at maybe a week’s worth of food left. So we may have an opportunity to do what we do best—reach isolated people. The devastation today, I felt it more. It hurt today to see that.” To date the death toll is over 1,400 people. Additionally, MAF has national staff with relatives from the area who are still missing. Please be in prayer for this country. Specifically for believing aid workers and local churches, that they would be faithful ambassadors to the hurting people in this area. 2018 has been a rough year for the country of Indonesia.
-The earth continues to shake in Lombok after the earthquake there took over 500 lives just two months ago. (MAF was able to provide some aid there as well.) -Earlier this year there were also church bombings in a city about 200 miles from us. This was the worst act of terror Indonesia has seen since 2002, and was carried out by a family with four children. You can find information about this HERE. HERE is a video put out by one of our teammates. So we ask for your prayers. For us. For Indonesian believers. For government officials. For grace. For this country and ours. “Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightnings, that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’? Who has put wisdom in the inward parts or given understanding to the mind?" Job 38: 34-36 |
AuthorsWe are just a couple of kids from Iowa learning to trust Christ daily and aiming to serve Him though mission aviation. Archives
August 2023
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