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As we expected the last four months have been very chaotic – talk about being thrown into the deep end.

Moving house and changing careers has ment as much time at home as away.

The first trip was only five days after we had arrived and involved flying a team from Times Square Church in New York to a remote location for a week. We helped them clear an area and dig the foundations for a clinic that a local church were building through an organisation called Doctors for Life.


The second trip was only a one day affair but involved six and a half hours of flying to collect some people who had been working in Moz and take them to Durban to meet up with the rest of their mission team.

The third trip was a nine day one where we again stayed with an American group who were partnering with a church in Pretoria to build a bible school in central Mozambique.
A fairly rough time as we had to camp in the bush with minimal facilities and although the weather was unusually cool the mosquitos were still quite a problem. The trip was split up though by having to fly up to northern Moz for a couple of days to transport some Dutch Lutheran Church guys who were doing research into church planting possibilities.


He has now just got back from an 11 day trip taking Dutch Reformed Church members on their annual tour of many mission stations in northern Moz. This last trip amounted to about 4000 miles of flying, enough to get you from London to Moscow and back or from Central America to the north of Canada.

Despite all this time apart we have managed to settle in very well and are now comfortably installed at Mercy Air. We have already had a number of visitors and are expecting a steady stream as the area around us is handy for all sorts of tourist type stuff.

One big hurdle was us getting three year extensions to our visitor’s visas which allows us to – and I quote, ‘remain on holiday whilst volunteering for Mercy Air’. Let us assure you the reference to holiday is purely ….. well, not quite fictitious but certainly not reflective of what’s happening.

Matthew found out that he passed his High school exams and is apparently keen to do journalism and music at a SA university which would start next February.

Cathy would like to get on the SA nursing register to allow her to help out in numerous medical roles. As is a lot of things round here, this looks set to be quite a paper chase. She went out with some nurses to see some home based care for people living with HIV/AIDS with a view to possibly getting involved. There seems to be many needs so pray for direction and opportunities and knowing what to do.

pcm

Hello in real time!

Well this is a novelty – being able to email from the comfort of our own front room. This almost forgotten facility is brought to us by the kindness of the local telephone company who have only taken two and a half months to work out how to get two wires from their exchange to our house three miles away – well done lads! People keep telling us how lucky we are as others who have applied for a line have often left phone-less only to have it installed just in time for the next people to move in. So, for all those of you who thought we had fallen down a big hole or been eaten by large animals with sharp teeth – sorry, but we’re alive and well and living near Nelspruit. We have been able to get the odd message out to a few from the office which we asked to be passed round but for most this will likely be the first you’ve heard from us in a good while. Please excuse us then if you’ve heard some of this before.

So now you know we’re still alive we’ll set about the task of replying personally to some of the 300 messages we had in our inbox when we finally downloaded. We’ll do it in a purely alphabetical or chronological order so please don’t be offended if we don’t get to you for ... a while. We may be some time….!

P n' C

A belated hello

We are feeling a lot more settled in now than when we last wrote, due partly to Paul having spent all of July so far at home in Nelspruit (he was away for 16 days in June on four separate mission flying trips). This has meant that we have been able to make the house look far more presentable and it is beginning to feel like we actually live here.

Life at home is possibly busier than when on trips and Paul has getting to grips with flight operations in the office. This is all the ground work in making a flight happen right from taking the telephone enquiry to preparing the aircraft for flight. Applying for permits and visas and all the other logistics can be quite a mission in it self in Africa.

Talking of visas, our application for a three year extension is now in the hands of the Dept. of Home Affairs. They have told us to come back this Wednesday…

It’s not all paper pushing while at home though and Paul has done some local flying to get ratings on two of the planes Mercy Air operate. This is a legal requirement before he can do mission flights on his own and even then the first couple will be with another pilot. This is more an orientation to some of the more awkward airstrips as well as introduction to various people and procedures at places we visit. The next bout of away-ness is due to take place from 1st to 11th Aug when Paul will be flying a group to six different places in Mozambique.

Cathy is in the process of applying to be registered with the SA nursing council as she need this in order to do any voluntary or paid work. She has been out with a group of nurses that provide home based care for people living with HIV and AIDS.

Matthew has returned to Lesotho for a month to join with a Dutch YFC team so the house is unusually quite right now. We have balanced this though with a steady flow of visitors mainly from Lesotho who are now including us on their holiday itinerary – now could it be us or the fact that we live only 20 mins from Kruger National Park!?

Please excuse our scant correspondence recently – it’s not best going through the office mail system. We won’t bore you with the phone saga save to say that Telcom are ‘working on it’. The latest news is that we should be connected two or three weeks from now – or was that what they said two or three weeks ago!? We know some of you have written and we’ll get personal replies out as soon as we can.

pcm

Arrival

We are finally here in White River! It seems to have been such a long time coming but now Lesotho seems a lifetime away and life is very busy.

We arrived here on the 2nd of June in a large removal truck with all our belongings after a 12 hour overnight trip from Lesotho. We then unloaded everything in two hours which was amazing as it took several weeks to pack up and two full days to load the truck!

700 kilometres (12 hours in a box van) is a long way in anybody’s book but Nelspruit is a world apart from Maseru. It’s a little lower than Maseru and gets a lot more weather being nearer the coast. This makes the area pleasantly green but not so pleasantly humid—it’s already got up to 36 degrees and it’s still only spring. Animal life is more varied. As well as the Big 5 and the herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically over the plains only half an hour away in Kruger, the area also boasts all manner of creepy crawlies that we won’t tell you about or you might not visit! Fortunately there is very little Malaria so we won’t have to take any medication except when we fly to Mozambique.

We live on a farm about 20 km’s outside Nelspruit that has it’s own 600m airstrip, hangars and maintenance facilities and we are one of six families directly involved with the work here.

Thanks for all your prayers!

Paul and Cathy