Marromeu Education and Health

This years cyclone season seems to be in full swing and we have had to rearrange and even cancel a few flights. It was with some relief, then, that that we went back up to Marromeu in Mozambique recently with an Education Ministry Team.
The team then drove up to the new YWAM base in Nensa whilst the pilot stayed in Marromeu to help restore a 20 ft container currently being used as a fuel store by the helicopter.

The helicopter went up on the same day and whilst it was flying health and education teams in and out of the Delta, Paul and Philip, a Swiss volunteer, set about sanding and priming the container.

It was 36 deg. on top of the container and 45 deg. inside!

Mercy Air has obtained and fitted out four other containers in South Africa and they will be transported up to Marromeu in the coming weeks. There will be accommodation, kitchen, laundry and ablution facilities for work and mission teams that go up to the area.

The helicopter flew daily into the Delta with the education and health teams.

It took us 20 mins to get to this one place called Luwawe, but it would of taken three days by dug out canoe. You can not drive or walk there!

On the ground at Luwawe.

The end of another hot and tiring day.

Mercy Air team

Hanger Progress

Things are really progressing up in Chimoio.

Gary and the guys are making the trusses!

The trusses are long and are made under the shade of the make shift building. With temperatures of 35 deg it would be difficult to do the work without it. We still need rain to break the heat and for the people's crops.

Bernie has been working on top of the structure all week and Al has spent a lot of time on the ladder at the other end helping secure the trusses.

Everyone has been working well together.

Looking the the building from the back side.

Ron the backhoe operator, who has done a great job and Barb, who serves the guys with food and drink to help them do their job.

We are all encouraged and blessed!

Mercy Air team.

Weather

There is only one cyclone/hurricane/typhoon active on the whole globe at the moment. Unfortunately it's in our back yard.

Occasionally we have to delay a trip for a few hours due to early morning fog. Once or twice we've had to divert to another airport due to bad weather. It's not often, though, that we postpone a whole flight altogether.

Right now we were expecting to be in the village of Nensa on the banks of the Zambezi with an education development team, but instead we are sat in the office in South Africa typing this update.

One of the last entries below detailed some weather that we had about a week ago that affected us in the east of South Africa. It seems that when that dissipated some of the moisture got sucked into another depression that was developing off the coast to the north of Mozambique and the result was another more powerful cyclone, misleadingly called Funso.

To give you an idea, two of the boxes on the map above are a little further than the length of the UK.

Currently Funso is a Category 3 cyclone but is forecast to develop into a Category 4 tomorrow (Katrina in the US a few years ago was a Category 5). Here's a map that shows rain intensity. Basically as you can see from the key, all the pinks and purples are as about as heavy rain as you can get.
The next two maps shows how quick it developed and are two days apart from each other.

All is not entirely lost though.

Mercy Air has a working relationship with a number of aid organisations (CARE, OXFAM, Save the Children etc) based in Maputo and we are on call to assist with natural disasters of varying magnitudes. The rain we had last week has now made it's way into the river systems and the levels are currently peaking in the lower Limpopo River Basin. They have asked us to do some survey flights to assess the situation and we will likely fly over early on Wednesday morning to take various NGO representatives to have a closer look.

Mercy Air team

More progress in Chimoio

Further to the last blog entry, we have received more photos of the hanger construction from our base in Chimoio.

The wall sections going up.  The backhoe is always in the middle of the action.

Connecting the wall sections to the foundation wall with the metal straps which were placed in the cement.You can see them if you look close. The guys put at least 10 screws in each strap to attach them to the columns.

The level in the center of the picture is used a lot. As in flying, straight and level is important.

Ron is running the backhoe, which is a huge asset. We couldn't function without it.

Man power is always a part of the equation. We have had 8 Moz guys helping us all week.

It was a great week and by Friday almost all the wall sections were up. Monday we will be doing the first trusses.  Please pray for safety as they work at height with heavy trusses.

Persis and I are keep the guys fed and in clean clothes and whatever else we can do to help them do the work they are doing.  It's been a pleasure to serve them.

On Sunday we went to an African church service.  It was a special time with lots of singing and great teaching by Joao, who is a Mozambican man and a missionary to the Moz people.  The service lasted two and a half hours but it didn't seem long at all.  

In the afternoon we went to the market to shop in one of the villages near by and this evening we had a braai/barbeque with the rest of the staff here on the mission. Lots of good food and fun, telling stories and laughing together!

Mercy Air team

Chimoio Progress

You may remember that we have built an airstrip at the ASAM/Mercy Air base in Mozambique.

 

Well a donated hangar recently arrived in Moz from the U.S. by ship. It cleared customs (no small task), then was transported by truck to the mission where it was off-loaded. It then had to be literally dragged along the dirt road from the drop off point by the highway all the way up to the airstrip.

The container with the hangar, being dragged along by the backhoe.

Well, the road probably needed to be graded anyway!

Logs had to be put underneath it so it could roll rather than drag over the bridge.

Hangar construction materials from inside the container had to be unloaded.

Ron Wayner and crew

Then the foundations for the hangar were poured.
A team from the US is now on site putting all the pieces together.

In the meantime, some final grading and work still needs to be done to finish the airstrip.

Mercy Air team

Inclament Weather - and then some!

Here in the eastern part of South Africa we have had about four days of almost constant and sometimes heavy rain. Any of the maps below will give you an idea.

 

This might be great for the fields, and crops and certain animals, but it certainly wasn't good for a couple of trees on the Mercy Air farm.

 

As you can see two large poplar trees fell down last night, one narrowly missing the Ziessler's house.
At least we'll be OK for fire wood this winter!

Mercy Air team

More Tea Vicar?

Recently Mercy Air was given 130 Kg of malarial medicine (enough to treat over 2300 people and well worth the effort of raising the money to cover the cost of flying it there) and asked to take it up to a mission station in the north of Mozambique that specializes in natural medicine.

Getting it from Durban wasn't too hard - it just arrived on a truck. Getting it to Nacala, on the other hand, was a different story. Nacala is half way back to the equator from where we are and 200 km further east than a line with Moscow.
We had a plane and a pilot, all we needed was money and fuel. People in the UK, Germany, Switzerland and the USA responded brilliantly to a request for funds, raising about half the costs. A week before our intended departure some guys from Hope for Africa (www.hopeforafricamission.co.za), rang with a request for help in getting three of them to Blantyre, Malawi. As it happened Blantyre was one of the few places that had avgas, so by having them cover most of the cost of that part of the flight, we could refuel there and still get to Nacala.

So, the packing began.
The nose, wing lockers and back of the plane full to the brim.

The total flying time from SA, via Blantyre, to the military airstrip in Nacala where we loaded the medicine into a pickup truck, was 7 hours.
Then there was a 2 hour drive mostly on dirt roads to Memba where they are based. We wouldn't say the road was bad but on the way we passed a grader that usually shapes the roads in Africa. I guess this one lost.
We arrived after dark and so delivered the medicine to various clinics the following day.
Martin and Simone Schumann along with Myriam Wahr, the missionaries working in Memba, have set up many rural clinics and use natural medicines, many of which they grow themselves.

Memba itself is a real back of the beyond type of place. It was attacked three times during the war (which ended 20 years ago), but nothing seems to have been fixed since then.
This was the hospital which was left in ruins...
and this is one of the main streets where trees in blossom provide a temporary relief from the usual dusty monotone appearance.
Martin and Simone have built a small three roomed house where Mercy Air helped install the electricity a year ago (http://mercyair-sa.blogspot.com/2010/11/woken-up-by-whales-but-not-whilst.html).
They get water from a public well on the other side of town...
but in the mean time are digging (chiseling) their own well.
The night before we left, we got a call asking us to pick up a lady who had been ill for a couple of weeks and needed to return to SA for further tests. So on the way back we routed via Lichinga to collect her and her kids as well as the guys we had dropped in Blantyre earlier.
The flight across to Lichinga took us past some very impressive scenery that shows the ruggedness and remoteness of parts of the world we fly into.
So, after 4300km (2700 miles) and 16 hours of flying, this is primarily written to thank those people who gave so freely towards the cost of this flight. Because of your generosity many other people will benefit and many of those will probably live longer than they would have done if we'd of all stood back and done nothing.

Mercy Air Team

Fire!

No joke actually.

After yesterdays mammoth flight to Chimoio we had planned having an easier day today. Well that all ended at 05:30 when we were alerted to a fire in the main house at Mercy Air. We rushed round to find the house filled with acrid smoke and the living room ceiling on fire. On top of this the electricity had tripped so inside and out was pitch black with the only light being the flames.

Guests had made a fire in the fireplace the previous evening and we suspect that some soot in the chimney had ignited and found its way through gaps in the mortar and then set light to old bee hive and rats nest material in the roof, which had then spread along the eves and up into other parts of the roof.

The back of the main house is almost completely made of wood but fortunately the fire was restricted by the small space between the ceiling and the tin roof. This hadn't stopped it spreading as such, but it had prevented it getting well out of control.

We knew the fire brigade wouldn't come out to us so we had to make our own plan. This amounted to stringing a line of garden hoses together to extinguish the visible flames inside. After that the darkness worked in our favour as we could then see additional flames flickering through other small gaps. This now meant that we had to get a ladder and axe and break down other parts of the ceiling and walls to get access to these different areas.

All in all it took us about an hour to bring things under control and make sure everything was well and truly out. This also included taking some of the corrugated roof sheets off.
This is the scene from inside after it got light.

All the black bit in the photo above was ablaze when we first arrived.

So, not a good day at all, but one which we realise could have ended far far worse if it hadn't been for God's protection.

So, not a good day at all, but one which we realise could have ended far far worse if it hadn't been for God's protection.

One week on from the fire and a couple of pics to show progress on the reconstruction. The first was after the corrugated sheets had been taken off showing the fire damaged portions.
And the second, a day later, when the internal tongue and groove had been removed.Mercy Air staff and volunteers are doing the work as there was no buildings insurance and we expect to complete it in about a weeks time.


Mercy Air Team