PCM News: A long interesting day...

16 July 2009

A long interesting day...

I was up well before dawn today to fly to Moz again.

First stop was Maputo.
You can often feel quite big and important when you're flying in and out of airports... until someone like this parks behind you.

Basically we flew for two hours... and then drove for two more hours... to get to a clearing in the middle of nowhere... full of pineapples...

Where we looked at them for 30 minutes.

There are lots of different sorts of pineapples - but they all looked pretty much the same to me.
They got really excited about this one...

So much so that we ate it.

On the drive back we stopped to have some food sold to us.

Hmmm

Later flying back into Maputo I saw the sun set from a plane for the third time in five days.

Paul

2 comments:

Depht said...: Love the picture of your plane in front of the commercial airliner (and the sunet photo)!; 16 July, 2009
Paul and Cathy said...: Thanks.
As in the blog about 'Mission Holiday', we often get to go from big international airports to a remote bush strip in one flight.

Sunset's are almost always pretty, but then it does get very dark in Africa after wards.; 17 July, 2009

Post a Comment

A short history of us

Not long after we were married we felt that God had some full time work for us overseas. This initially began with a move to Sheffield in 1992 to work for a Christian management training company. Three years later we felt the Lord's prompting that another change was imminent and this led to a move to Africa where we helped set up a youth program with the Lesotho-Durham link in the capital Maseru. An initial three year commitment turned into four after which the youth work was handed over to the nationals.

Then, after feeling God was moving us into mission flying Paul enrolled at a flying school and completed his South African commercial license with an instrument rating in December 1999.

We moved from Lesotho to White River in South Africa in June of 2003 where we now work with Mercy Air. Mercy Air was borne out of Youth with a Mission (YWAM) and is a sister, although smaller organisation to the more well known Mercy Ships. We are situated near Nelspruit and provide a service to missions and the development/aid community in the southern African region but mainly serve Mozambique.

We operate four aircraft at present - a Quest Kodiak, a Cessna 310 and two Airbus 350 helicopters which are often used for the relief flights.

When not flying Paul is responsible for flight operations and is Mercy Air's Safety Officer.

Cathy, who is a registered Nurse and Midwife works part time at Africa School of Missions which is a bible college preparing missionaries for overseas service. She teaches in their School of Health and is part of a team which visits a number of rural clinics during the week. She is also helps with the hospitality ministry that Mercy Air runs.

Matthew spent four years at Rhodes University in Grahamstown where he studied photo journalism. He has now flown the nest and is living with his wife in Durban. They have a young daughter named Isabella.