On His Wings of Love: Flowing with Change

Greetings dear friends and family,

General Update

Well this month has been filled with change. At the start of the month we were still living at the MAF guesthouse next to the airport waiting for work permits and our stuff from Salatiga. Well when it rains it pours here not only literally but figuratively as well. Monday Sept 8 our stuff arrived which meant moving time to our house assignment up at Pos 7. So we unloaded all our stuff and Julie had the day off from teaching so she headed to the house which wasn't quite ready as it needed a good cleaning. That same day we got word that we needed to go back to Jakarta as our visa/work permit had come through. It was decided we would go to Jakarta the following Monday and we could use that week to move into the house. Praise the Lord all of our stuff made it and was in relatively good shape. We are still waiting for paperwork before we can resume using our bike & scooter from Salatiga, hopefully it won't be to much longer for that paperwork to arrive. In the mean time I bought a "homemade" trail bike that I'm using when it wants to work and Julie has learned to drive a manual car from the right side and she uses that when needed, (I've been using it to when required but I still prefer my bike even with it's unreliable nature). We are mostly moved in but still have a few things that haven't found a home and a few things that we can't find, that probably were left behind in Canada thinking we didn't need them. All in all we are settling in pretty good.

Franklin's collar bone continues to heal well. This past week I've seen him reading a somewhat large book all on his own which was very cool to see. We also got the report from his time in Singapore yesterday so Julie has started to read through it and see what we can implement at home to help his continual learning process.

Isaac is enjoying school and he has enjoyed the fact that Julie is often at the school for lunch and recess. He scored 100% on a science test the other day which he was pretty excited about. Math is still a struggle but it seems to be a bit better than last year for him.

Jaclynn is doing pretty good in school as well. She is however complaining that she can't play as much and doesn't get as many fun activities this year in school. I guess we forgot to tell her that every year school is going to get harder with higher expectations on studying.

Julie is doing amazing work keeping the house in order and teaching Franklin his acidemic courses. Since I've started to report to work everyday I haven't been able to keep up on the dishes like before. It seems that Franklin is picking up some of that slack. She also put together a chore list today which I hope will help lighten her load as we work together as a family to keep house.

Greg's Work Update

In the MAF Papuan program the new standard for pilots is to start training in the Kodiak. There are several good reasons for this. So before we had our work permits to keep busy and productive, I spent my time reading technical manuals in preparation for maintenance and flight for the Kodiak (and washed the dishes among other domestic things). And to keep with the title of the blog earlier this week it was decided that the Papua program needed a Caravan driver sooner than another Kodiak driver. So Tuesday morning I received word that I was being switched over to train in the Caravan instead of the Kodiak. There was many factors that lead the Papuan management team to this change in directions for me, some of which I'm not privy to. I'm however excited about the change other than I had to restart all the reading and start working through the Caravan manuals. The Kodiak is a great plane and someday in the future (likely on our second or third term) I look forward to flying it as well. Since receiving a new set of manuals to read I was able to get through most of reading material for maintenance and a fair chunk of the flight related reading along with some hanger flying, all in all a good week. Not sure what all of next week will look like, Monday I will go on my first ride along flight into the interior which I'm excited about and then later in the week there is a Caravan coming from Timika for an inspection which I might have the privilege of working on. The check out process will take 9-12 months depending on many things after which we will be posted to one of the other 4 bases in Papua for the foreseeable future. The process for me to get checked out for solo operations is a long and what might seem laborious process, it is however for good reasons. Papua's mountains are littered with aluminum (airplanes) of those that were unprepared and under trained, there are also a few of experienced veterans that let their guard down as well. All that to say MAF has a well laid out training program to prepare and train me and other new pilots with the skills and attitudes required to get me home at the end of the day or next day if an overnight is required.

As we continue to flow with change please continue to up hold our family in your prayers.

The following are some picture from when we first opened our crates that beat us to Sentani from Nampa. Also some pictures from moving day and around our yard at the house in Pos 7.