Having a whale of a time

We have had some Swiss guys give up a lot of time to come and help us at Mercy Air by extending one of the hangers and making and installing some hangar doors. By way of a thank-you, we let them charter us at cost for a long weekend break in Durban.

We obviously went to the beach and watched a lot of people balance on surf boards.
Cathy fancied the idea..
..but seemed to forget the key bit of kit when it came to actually giving it a go.
We went to the aquarium and some a big fish...
..and some very impressive jumping Dolphins.
No trip to the sea side would be complete without a comprehensive harbour tour...
..before a rather cramped taxi ride getting us and our hired surf boards back from whence we came.
We returned to White River late afternoon on the Monday, and 07:00 the following day we were back out again taking a small team and some supplies up to Mercy Air's base in Chimoio in Mozambique. It was quite a big day flying wise (7.5 hrs), but nothing out of the ordinary worth relating in a blog, and nothing really worth taking pictures of.

Mercy Air team

Upcomming busy

Going to be dead busy in the next dew weeks.

Tomorrow (Friday) we're off to Durban with a Swiss group for the week end - coming back on Monday. 5 hrs flying.

Tuesday morning We're off up to Moz to drop a couple of guys off at a mission station in Chimoio and traveling back the same day. 7 hrs flying.

Next Friday we will be part of a building team visiting two mission locations in Moz. One is at Marromeu on the Zambezi and the other in Nacala, on the coast and well up in the north of the country. We will stay for a total of 10 days and do 14 hrs of flying. On the way back we will pick up the two guys we take up to Chimoio next Tuesday.

As always - better busy than bored.

Regards

Mercy Air team

Safe - to a tee

Four Mercy Air staff have just returned from a Safety Conference in Gaborone, Botswana. It was arranged by Botswana Flying Mission for the Christian Aviation Alliance and was also attended by a number of other mission flying organisations as well as the Botswana Ministry of Transport, Police Air Wing and Civil Aviation Authority - in all about 50 people.

There are only so many inspiring pictures you can take to capture the excitement of any conference - so this is our best shot:
Riveting eh! Seriously though, it was very worthwhile and we had many good discussions as well as catching up with some old friends.

Mercy Air team

What a long way that was

Last week we flew a team from a church in Cape Town to visit some of their missionaries in Mongu, Zambia and Quelimane, Mozambique. The trip involved five countries and almost 3000 miles (4500 km) of travel. Enough to get you from London to the North Pole.
We had flown a team to Mongu five years ago and were looking forward to returning to see how the work was getting on. Mongu is set on the banks of the Zambezi River flood plain only 75 miles from the Angolan border and is known for having one of Africa's only inland harbors.
They find that people are willing to walk about an hour each way to church and so their vision is to plant a church within walking distance of each person in Zambia's Western Province which is about the same size as the UK. The area is vast and the calculation is that they will need 65000 churches for the one million people living there. Currently they have 65 churches planted.

We visited some of their churches in Mongu...
and then drove out to one of the bush churches...
The road to and from this church was arduous and dusty, and required a 4x4.
Some of the churches they have planted are many days drive away and when the Zambezi floods - in places up to 50 km wide, it is easier to get there by boat.

There are many aspects to their work including the above mentioned church planting, but they also run a Bible School for the church leaders, as well as orphan care, community development including primary health care, community schools and agricultural development.
You can find more information at their well laid out website at: www.zam.co.za

Strangely enough, one thing we remembered about Mongu is the plethora of barber shops as well as the many interesting and almost biblical names given to these businesses.
We spent two nights in Mongu and then headed east via Livingstone, for customs and immigration, through Harare, Zimbabwe for fuel (yes fuel!) and on to Quelimane in Mozambique.

On the way we did a quick lap of Victoria Falls...
The guys in Quelimane have set up projects very similar to those in Zambia. These include:
Schools work...
Agricultural projects...
Brickmaking - for commercial and for building some churches...
A Bible School held in a church.
In the evening the students put mattresses on the floor and throw mozzy nets over the pews to sleep. The kitchen is a wooden structure round the back of the church building.
They have also set up a prison ministry which we unfortunately didn't have time to visit.

One project we did visit involved a long drive down a road lined by coconut trees...
Once there a young bloke shimmied up a tree and chucked a load of coconuts down. Then another bloke attacked them with a machette...
so that we could have a cool drink of coconut milk.
We could go through the details of all the work here but it is better told at the World Wide Missions site: www.wwm.org.za
Thanks

Mercy Air team

Farm hands

While the Great Whyrley team were here they also helped out on the Mercy Air farm. One job we had was to demolish an old house that was infested with termites.

It used to look like this
But now looks more like this.
We were able to recover a lot of the fittings (roofing, pipes, electrical etc) and will clear the area and likely offer the area for future staff to build a new house. Other than that it was a handy source of firewood for a while.

Another group gave our main office a paint face-lift.

Mercy Air team

Chimoio

The day after the Durban flight (below), we set off with another team from Great Whyrley to Mercy Air's remote base just north of Chimoio, Mozambique. During the four days we were there we did many things including helping with food distribution to orphans that ASAM had placed with 'Grandma's' in various locations in the community. Each orphan is given oil, rice, maize, beans, salt, dried fish and soap.

One of the Grannie's used to live in a grass house similar to the one in the picture, but ASAM helped with the building of a brick house. The grass house is now the kitchen.

ASAM have various agricultural projects, one of which are a series of gardens that grow food for the orphan programe.
One lady we visited had lost a leg to a land mine a few years ago. She lives with her daughter who was born blind. ASAM had also helped with building a brick house and one morning we visited her and helped her grind some maize.
The next day we painted the inside of the house for them.
Many of the kids we met had Tinia Capitus which is a fungal infection which prevents hair from growing.
As usual we stayed at ASAM and one day we found a Green Mamba that had been killed.
Or so we thought. Turns out that it wasn't very dead, as we found out when he curled up after we pulled his tail.
We visited the area that has been cleared for an airstrip. 1.2 km long and 100m wide. Still a lot of work to do.

On the last evening we got a call to help a man that had had an epilectic fit, rolled over onto the fire and burned his legs - a week previous. He'd been to the local witch doctor who had put some black stuff on, but his legs didn't get any better. We had to walk quite a way into the bush to get to his village but Cathy and Lynne (both nurses) managed to help him by cleaning and dressing his wounds.

His condition was serious enough that he might even lose his legs, so we picked him up the day after and took him to a hospital 80km away.
It was a very packed few days and we managed to grab a bit of scenery and fly back past a particularly nice bit of Mozambique coast appropriately called Paradise Island.Next blog should be in a weeks time about our next trip to Western Zambia and Mozambique.

Mercy Air team

Way up in Moz

We have just returned from a nine day trip taking a Brazilian team to run a conference for between 3-400 pastors in Nampula, Mozambique.
The total distance would get you from London to 300 miles past Moscow which helps explain why they wanted to fly.
Other speakers from the US and Brazil also flew in, and the conference went very well. The team made a documentary whilst there and their aim was to live stream the conference via the web to almost 30000 people around the world, although a cut fibre optic cable a few hundred miles away meant that the internet was down in Moz during their stay.

A number of sessions were run concurrently each day. Some outside under the trees...
and some in the big tent.
Cooking for all the pastors in the evening was an event in itself.
Mercy Air's pilot, Paul, managed to meet up with another pilot friend whilst there and spent a few days flying jump seat with him in an Embraer 120, which was fun and very different from the type of flying he usually does.
Mozambique is very colourful and whilst driving around we saw all sorts - including the local bed salesman.
During a rare moment of spare time in Beira, we went to see an old wreck that we often fly over, a photo of which appeared in the previous blog post.
This Saturday we fly a UK team down to Durban to visit a hospital they help support and the day after we take another team up to Chimoio, Moz again to visit ASAM and the Mercy Air remote base. More blogging about that next week.

Regards

Mercy Air team