Pemba Medivac

"It's a go", crackled the voice on the telephone.

These were words that meant we could spring into action but three 'o' clock in the afternoon was now a bit late in the day.

We had been advised of the possibility of doing a medivac at midday and had got ourselves and the plane ready. The patient had been admitted to hospital and the doctors had suspected meningitis or cerebral malaria, either of which could lead to death within a day or two if immediate treatment wasn't given. But the patient was more than half way back to the equator from where we were and getting to them that day was now out of the question. Pemba is on the very north coast of Mozambique more than a thousand miles from Mercy Air and even in a plane that does over 170 mph, it was going to be a long way.

We have friends a third of the way up in Beira and a quick phone call secured us a lift from the airport and a bed for the night - we were very grateful. We arrived after dark and were up again before dawn to continue up to Pemba. The patient in question was actually a friend of ours from previous mission trips and had asked for a nurse to come along to monitor him during the flight. In a way it was good to see him again although not quite under these circumstances. After airport paperwork and waiting for the patient to arrive from the hospital we were back in the air and on our way home, this time loaded up with his wife and two kids, one of which was just nine months old.


There's not much you can say about seven hours of flying at 10,000ft, and the haze from the bush fires meant that the view was only slightly more interesting than the hour and a half of dark after the sun went down.

We landed safely in South Africa last night just after 19:00 and they rang us this morning to say that he had been kept in hospital till two in the morning after extensive tests. So far things are looking good but they will stay here for at least the next week for observation and treatment if necessary.

So, it was another of those occasions where your whole day is changed by a single phone call. We were privileged to be the ones who were able to practically offer assistance but without the prayers and support of people like yourselves, Mercy Air would not be in that position.

Thank you.

Mercy Air team

The Perfect Romantic Coup

Fly your wife to Mozambique for our anniversary and have a candlelit dinner in the evening.

And that's exactly what happened for one of Mercy Air's pilots, although as you might guess, that was only the tip of the iceberg as far as the story was concerned.

The reason they were actually flying to Mozambique on their anniversary was to take a doctor team to Marromeu on the Zambezi River. The candlelit dinner was courtesy of the fact that the missionaries at whose house they found themselves that night don't have electricity, and candles were the only way to light up the rice, beans, chicken and green veg they had for dinner.

It was apparently still romantic, and a very worthwhile trip. We have flown this group many times before and they had asked Cathy to accompany them as she knows about a lot of things that many doctors from the US haven't even heard of. The missionaries there have been working into the Delta region of the Zambezi for many years. They used to travel three days by dugout canoe to get there, stay a week, and then three days back often traveling at night to catch the tides. Our helicopter does the trip in 20 minutes and so each day it made a number of flights in order to get the doctors and translators to the remote village of Ibo. Paul stayed in Marromeu to fuel the heli each time it returned.

Whilst walking around in Ibo Cathy spotted a two month old baby which had diarrhorea and was severely dehydrated. The mother had died during childbirth and a young girl of 15 was looking after it. The team were able to put up an IV and give antibiotics and the next day the heli bought the baby to a care centre in Marromeu where it will stay until it is strong enough to survive. If this baby had not been seen and treated it would likely of died in a day or two.


The work in the delta is a pressing one. There are huge amounts of people who don't have access to any medical care whatsoever.

It is your prayers and support that help us go back to bring Christ's love to those people in need.

Thank you.

Mercy Air team

Mocuba

"I have a flight permit number for you." These were good words to hear over the satellite phone when we called to give our regular half hourly position report. We had less than an hour to run to Beira International Airport in Mozambique which was our first port of call on a flight taking people up who were involved in a re-development project. The trip had been arranged at relatively short notice but a national holiday in Mozambique the previous day had prevented us obtaining the official permit number. The only way forward was to set off early in the morning and have the Mercy Air office phone whilst the flight was taking place. Being armed with this short assortment of 'official' letters and numbers would potentially avoid a lot of hassle and red tape on our arrival at Beira.


We were met by a Christian friend who lives and works in Beira. Knowing we were coming his way he had asked us to buy some 'hard-to-obtain' groceries in South Africa and bring them up. He was glad for the small stash of luxury we could provide. He is also a pilot and introduced us to Hans, a German friend of his who was refueling his plane just in front of ours. Hans was doing a low level game count survey flying and two days earlier had been taking off after refueling at Cuamba, a military airfield two hours flight to the north. He had heard a 'rat-ta-tat' and after years of flying in the Congo recognised it as machine gun fire. He quickly banked and flew at tree top level away from the airfield. On landing back in Beira he found two bullet holes in his aircraft. One had gone through the wing and missed the fuel tank by less than 30cm, the other had hit the belly of the aircraft, entered a tool box and had destroyed a monkey wrench. Had it of gone further it might well of hit his wife who was sitting in the back seat. We looked at the bullet holes and exchanged stories. Mercy Air had been in Cuamba only two weeks earlier in the very plane we were flying and we had also taken a mission team up there the previous year.

This is a very isolated incident but it just got me thinking that when we ask you to pray for safety, it doesn't just cover weather, good decision making and the mechanical integrity of the aircraft.

Next week we are off to Moz with a team doing a medical mission in the Zambezi Delta. Likely another short update then.

Thanks again for your prayers and support.

Mercy Air team

Can you fly to Livingstone... now?

Some have written recently wondering if we're still alive.

The good news is that we are, although finding time to write about what we've been up to seems night on impossible. Here's an attempt.

We have done a number of flights (as you would hope and expect). A more recent one saw us fly to Livingstone in Zambia - with 20 minutes notice. It was actually for another organisation who's pilot couldn't do the flight at the very last minute, and was a good exercise in planning as you go! It turned out to be a big day (and half a big night) and covered 1500 miles which is about the same as going from London to the north of Africa and half way back.


This Wednesday we have a flight to the north of Mozambique, returning the following day. The equivalent distance here would get him from the UK to Newfoundland.

Last weekend we hosted a missionary friend whom we knew in Lesotho and who is now working in Zimbabwe. When we went there for a holiday years ago we bought back a few bank notes as souvenirs. We still have them, a 5, 10 and 20 Zim Dollar note. Our friend was kind enough to donate a few of her current Zim notes to our collection and we now have a 10, 50 and a 250 million Zim Dollar note. So, we're millionaires, although the reality is that you need three of the 50 million ones to buy a can of Coke!

A number of Mercy Air staff are on furlough at the moment which again puts a lot pressure on the ones still here. We have therefore been extremely busy in the office. We are looking to sell our Beech 18 and we recently flew it to Johannesburg to show it off to some prospective buyers. We then worked on various proposals for it's replacement which we are hoping will be a pressurised turboprop aircraft. We have also had a big Civil Aviation inspection last week which we had to prepare for.

Mercy Air's helicopter is currently busy in the Zambezi Delta with mission and food distribution work. Matthias Reuter the pilot writes:

"After an intensive maintenance service, the Mercy Air helicopter was once again on its way to the poorest of the poor. We started working immediately after our flight from South Africa to the small town of Tambara on the Zambezi river. The goal of our mission was to provide further help to the victims of the flood at the beginning of the year. Using our helicopter, we transported many tons of goods in cargo nets to the people who lost everything in the border region between Mozambique and Zimbabwe.


Further downstream we brought more than 25 tons of food to a remote region at the shores of the Zambezi river. Everything from rice to beans, to flour and cooking oil was safely carried in the cargo netsbeneath the helicopter to the people in need.We were also able to provide medical support. In collaboration with the government of Mozambique, we carried out several vaccination campaigns for children and were able to airlift medical personnel to several remote villages. For most of the local people this is the only possibility to get medical help and medicine. Thank you very much for your help and support - it makes it possible for the "wings of love for people in need" to fly again - tomorrow."

Thank you

Mercy Air team

Moz for an hour

As we haven't been in touch for a while, here is a short summary of the last few months activities in our hot and thundery neck of the woods.

We have done a number of short trips, mainly to Moz and on one occasion he stayed less than an hour!

This was all part of the plan though as the previous day we had received news of a man who needed urgent medical evacuation to Jo'burg.
Flight permits were obtained, plans made and we left early Sunday morning with the paramedic.

Our patient turned out to be the Captain of a ship that was delivering supplies to Beira. We picked him up after a three hour flight to Moz and then flew him another four hours to Jo'burg where an ambulance met him at the plane.


Another flight two weeks ago involved taking an elderly couple to Pretoria for urgent medical tests.

We spent last Thursday in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. He managed to talk to a number of people whilst waiting for his passengers and it seems that things are as bad there as we are led to believe. One lady wanted to know when he was coming again and said he should bring food and bibles. With the elections less that a week away, many seem to think that the campaigning might be in vain, as the votes have likely already been counted.

Reminiscent of the dark days (nights) of 1971 and the coal miners strike in the UK, South Africa has been experiencing major Power Cuts recently. The reason is load shedding which basically means Eskom, the power company, hasn't got enough capacity to supply everyone at the same time. Unfortunately the future's looking pretty bleak as they don't reckon they'll have the problems sorted this side of 5-8 years. The joke, 'Eskom are sorry to announce that the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off to conserve electricity' would be funny if it wasn't so true.

The upshot of this is that electricity prices are set to go up by over 50% soon, to help fund the construction of new power stations. This is on the back of a 50% rise in the price of petrol in the last year.

Mercy Air's helicopter is back in SA now for some routine maintenance on the tail rotor gearbox. Routine maintenance in this case involves shipping the gearbox off to New Zealand for overhaul. When it returns the heli has one more trip to make back up to Moz to finish off with the Zambezi flooding and then it will go to Lesotho to help Mission Aviation Fellowship transport materials to build a remote clinic in the mountains.

Thank you again for your prayers and support which make things like the above possible.

Mercy Air team

Fire!

As seems traditional, the break in communication is due to having little time to think, let alone write.

We were out just about every day last week flying for another mission organisation doing relatively local flights. For the digit heads that all equated to about 3500 miles and 400 gallons of fuel.

It was a hard week not only for the long hours, but also that most of them were spent battling huge amounts of smoke. Our area and the north of Swaziland have had the worst forest fires in 60 odd years and huge amounts of land were simultaneously ablaze.


Hundreds of thousands of hectares have been mentioned which is probably half the size of Wales, but the consequence for us has been visibility down to a few hundred feet in places. Some routes that we would usually fly at 3500ft could only be run at 12000ft. The smoke covered the eastern side of South Africa from top to bottom and drifted over Mozambique to the coast.


Out of the smoke it was great, but the airstrips are in the valleys and finding them was a bit of a mission at times, especially when the sun was low.

The week ended with a long overnight haul up to Moz with a group that are developing a work in a remote area between Beira and Zimbabwe.

Mercy Air team

Prison baptisms

Another quick update as we have been busy again.

We spent a week in Moz two weeks ago with a pastoral group from the US. They were there to help a mission team run three days of training and teaching sessions for local pastors, some of whom had traveled for over a day on rickety bicycles to attend.

The missionaries there have also been working for a long time with the inmates of the town prison where 130 men share a 5m x 5m room. They are often in there 24 hours a day and only get one cup of corn meal and a cup of water per day. The inmates are imprisoned for anything from murder to stealing bread, and some can be detained for up to two years before their trial is even heard. Daily, the missionaries have given them medical and spiritual input but the highlight of this trip was when 20 men were baptised.


Last Saturday we flew a joint trip with Mission Aviation Fellowship and took another US team to the coastal town on Inhambane. It was a long day (8 hrs flying and over 1000 miles) as we just dropped them off and ended up flying back to SA at night. A year ago we had taken a small exploratory team to various places in Moz as they were searching for somewhere to start an outreach (see 19th Mar 2006, 'Where to plant a church'). It was good therefore to be the first to fly a large team in to the location they had chosen.

Today (Tuesday) we were out again assisting Zumat with a couple of flights. We took some people down to Natal and then picked up some pastors and flew them to a mission station just north of Durban. Not in itself too spectacular, but the one hour flight would of taken them the best part of a day to complete by road. This was yet another day that ended well past sunset.




Mercy Air team

Bits and bobs

We have been very busy at Mercy Air lately.

We have been doing some flying for Zululand Mission Air Transport (ZUMAT) again in their 207. Most of these flights have been one day affairs so it’s actually nice to get out of the office and go flying, but still spend the night at home.


This Thursday we're off to Moz for a week with a group of pastors who will be running teaching sessions for local pastors. Then he’ll have two days at home before collecting another group in Johannesburg and taking them to the Mozambican coastal town of Inhambane for their outreach.

We’ve changed the big radial engines on the Beech so that's thundering round the sky again.


The Cessna 310 is in a million bits (engines, wings, undercarriage off and ready for inspection), and the 210 is as busy as an agitated mosquito. The heli has done a couple of outreaches in Moz and will be off there again on the 23rd of this month.


Mercy Air team

A flood, a storm, a small helicopter and a very large Russian cargo plane

We just got back this afternoon from another trip in Mozambique.

There are two centres of relief operation in Moz at the mo as the country is reeling from two natural disasters, the flooding along the Zambezi and Cyclone Favio which hit last week in the south.

We flew the helicopter crew back to Beira where they'd left it during the storms, and then helped reassemble it.

All the main aid organisations are involved, Oxfam, Red Cross, WFP etc, and while the heli was busy doing sling load food drops, the fixed wing aircraft was shuttling incoming international workers between the main centres. The centre for the flooding is at Caia and the one for the cyclone is at Vilanculos. Both are only about 130 miles from Beira (in opposite directions), but each is also at least a days drive away. In the aircraft this is reduced to one hour, which obviously saves huge amounts of time, and means that the logistics of getting aid to the people who need it can be accomplished far quicker. It was also encouraging to see the number of Christian Relief organisations involved such as Food for the Hungry, Humedica and Operation Blessing whom we were partnering with.

There was a huge Russian cargo plane that bought in a Norwegian Red Cross mobile hospital and doctors for Vilanculos. He flew the advance team down whilst the shipment was being trucked down.

The Ilyushin 76 with one of the many trucks than transported the 25 tons of hospital to Vilanculos.

There were 6000 buildings in Vilanculos that lost their roofs including the hospital and the prison!

Thanks

Mercy Air team

Relief updates

Again, we just want to keep you in the loop of what's happening in our large-ish corner of the world.

Below are two articles, the first sent out by Matthias, our heli pilot and the second by Operation Blessing, the main organisation we flew for last week.

Fixed wing is flying back up to Caia, Moz tomorrow with Matthias and will stay for as long as necessary, to fly in support of the helicopter as well as other organisations who are involved in the relief effort.

It will be interesting to see how things have changed since the cyclone hit last Friday.

Thanks

Mercy Air team

"When we lifted off the Mercy Air Base in White River, SA, with the Helicopter two weeks ago, we had no idea how drastic our plans were going to change. What was supposed to be a “regular” dental out-reach with a Dentist couple from Switzerland, together with the Community Church of Mozambique and local health workers, turned into a full blown disaster relief operation.

Half way though the programme we got reports from Paul, another Mercy Air pilot who had done some survey flights over central Mozambique. We stopped the work in the far south, loaded up and headed north to the uncertain situation of the flood stricken Zambezi river basin. What we found was a disaster, with aid only just starting.

We may be away from home again for an extended period of time, BUT its a small price to pay for assisting people who don’t even have a home any more, and have lost loved ones in the floods.

The days are filled with flying Humedica’s medical teams directly to those in need as well as air lifting food, water purification and shelters into the affected areas of thousands of people in need.Flight operations were suspended as Cyclone Favio moved onshore last Friday, destroying houses and infrastructure. Several people lost their lives and many were injured. Another large Cyclone is already forming over the Indian Ocean.

Thank you very much for being part of our crew through support and prayers in this extremely busy time. Blessings, Matthias."

Mozambique dispatch: A white flag as waters rise. Report by David Darg.

David Darg is an aid worker with U.S. humanitarian organisation Operation Blessing International, which is working with charity partners Humedica and Mercy Air to reach communities stranded by rising waters in the Zambezi flood basin in Mozambique. So far we have located and served three communities, each one containing over 1,000 Mozambicans seeking refuge from the floods. As the water approached, the people ran to higher ground and became trapped on all sides. Consequently they have no food, adequate shelter or access to clean water.

Since identifying them we have been ferrying a constant supply of food and relief items to these communities by helicopter. With their homes destroyed, the people are living in grass huts, which are great for keeping the sun out but not the rain. Yesterday and today we have been dropping plastic sheeting as fast as we can in anticipation of Cyclone Favio. It's frightening to think that the people we are now serving could be wiped out if the cyclone brings too much rain.

We are flying Mercy Air’s Eurocopter and a Bell Jet-Ranger is on the way so as soon as the storm passes we can get right in to the hardest hit areas with two choppers. The International Red Cross and World Food Programme are supplying us with all the relief goods we can shift as we are one of only three helicopters on the ground. These "islands" can only be accessed by small choppers like ours and presently evacuation isn't an option for the people. On almost every flight we take we are discovering new pockets of people trapped by the floods. As we fly over mile after mile of swollen rivers and swamps where crops were growing just weeks ago it is chilling to think of how many more people are stranded in this vast area. Many of the inhabitants of the flood region made it to safety and are being cared for in camps by NGOs. But for thousands more this crisis is getting worse. We are targeting these emergency cases at maximum capacity and there is no doubt that we are saving many lives. Our prayer is that the lives we are saving today are not destroyed over the coming days by more rain.

We discovered the community Canga by accident during an assessment flight on Sunday. We had been searching for homes underwater and trapped individuals and never expected to find 1,200 people surrounded and desperate. Our pilot spotted a white flag flying from a tall wooden pole. We hovered to take a closer look and saw a red cross on the flag. The people were pointing frantically as if to say they needed medical attention.

When we returned in the afternoon we were told that because of lack of food three children had died the previous day. We immediately returned to deliver food provided by the World Food Programme and yesterday dropped a team of three doctors to tend to the urgent health needs of the community.

Landing on the first food drop was an amazing experience. The people were singing and cheering, knowing that someone had finally come to rescue them. Yesterday we took the head of the International Red Cross emergency response team, Alexandre Claudon de Vernisy, on an assessment to Canga. Alexander was amazed to learn that a local Red Cross representative was amongst those stranded on the "island" and it was he who had erected the flag. The representative told us: "I knew that if I put up a flag you would come to save us". It's an amazing story and we hope it will have a happy ending although we are prepared for the worst."

David