June 24, 2006

Hi Jack,
I have a day off today and Roger is away so I am taking the opportunity of
getting some email away. Life has been hectic as you can imagine. I am well
into the training with Roger now and it is going quite well. The plane is so
busy. So much local mission flying needing to be done and the work is
steadily increasing as local missions with new administrators catch on to how
we can help them with the plane. We are churning out the hours more rapidly
than when I was here before. The main problem before was the reliability of
the aircraft. Linden has spent 150K Australian on the aircraft and really
smartened it up and it is very reliable now. I can see that this kind of
method of aircraft care will pay rich dividends in the amount of service that
can be done in a year per plane. We are on track to do double what we could
get out of each plane before. This will more than cover the cost of the major
work done and will benefit the program for a few years to come.

Things are progressing with the second airplane, the one for our grass routes
missionary work. Simon rang last week and told me he hopes to have the
finance settled by last Friday and was planning to pick the aircraft up at
Mareeba yesterday. He has arranged for someone to fly it down to Townsville
where he is currently working and then do a thorough inspection on it to make
sure we don’t face too many hiccups in the first 100 hours of operation. He
and his Dad are still planning to bring it up here on the 13th of July. They
will spend a night on the way so they can get into the highlands in the
morning. The local people are excited and very supportive of the idea of a
lay ministry fleshing out the aviation capacity a bit.

We had a sad event last week. I was asked to go into Maimafu to pick up some
sick people. We went out there and could not get in due to low cloud
obstructing the final approach path. The aircraft was due for maintenance the
next day so it was not until the following day that I could try to get back in
there. That morning a 12 month old child passed away. Another kid died too
during the night. I felt so sorry for the parents. Job and his wife faced
the dilemma of staying out there to bury their little one or come into town to
get his wife fixed up. She could hardly walk and was very week. The hospital
says they think she has acute TB. They cried all the way in to town in the
plane. I could not help thinking that when the second plane arrives, there
will normally be one out of the 2 available to do these urgent medical
evacuations. The people are really suffering and hanging out for this so bad.

We had to take a coffin from Karimui to Negabo the other day. The man must
have been huge. The coffin was the largest I have ever seen. We could not
fit seats inside the plane as well. Finally I suggested that Roger do the run
on his own and pick me up on the way back. I was glad in a way because the
guy had been dead a couple of days and the odor was quite compelling to say
the least. While I sat on the ground there talking with the people, we got
around to talking about elementary schools. I think I mentioned to you that
the Lutheran mission has got right into this. The government has a new scheme
where they do a short course of training to help people become elementary
teachers. They try and get educated local people for this because they
are normally willing to go back to these remote inhospitable places and stay
there for the long term and make a lasting contribution to education in their
village. Apparently students from these schools learn to read and write and
to count, add, subtract, multiply and divide. The government lets those who
want to go on, go straight into grade 3 at a formal school. I think this is
really exciting. There is a formal church school at Karimui with a paid head
master and other teachers. One of the teachers is a volunteer and has a
vision for these elementary schools. He has started 3 of them although only
one of the teachers teaching at them has gone through level one of the
training course. There are 3 levels and the teachers do level one, go out
into practical teaching for a while and then go to level 2 and so on. These
schools feed into the bigger formal school with formally trained fully
qualified teachers.

I feel the opportunity for evangelism here is stupendous. These elementary
teachers are working for nothing and would work loyally for a long time for a
modest volunteer type stipend like our laymen and nurses get. There are so
many communities out there that have no school. Illiteracy in PNG is on the
rise. What an opportunity for the Adventists this is. If we can have a few
of these guys sent out to remote communities where there are no Adventists,
they can teach the kids the basics of elementary school and if we have the
right missionary minded people, they will also teach the parents the gospel.
I see this as an inexpensive opening wedge to get our message into these
remote communities and provide a valuable service to the villages that the
government is not currently providing. I think it would be fantastic if we
could have an Adventist training school for these elementary teachers that
would supervise their professional development and mentor them as teaching
missionaries to remote villages. The government has people that will come out
to the bush and teach these would be elementary teachers how to teach school.
It costs about K1000 per new teacher which is not that much in hard currency.
I would really like to see this avenue of missionary endeavor fostered through Mission Support Network. Once we get rolling with the plane and have a broader support base, we can advertise for
people to sponsor the training and volunteer stipend support for these missionaries.

If we can zero in on Nina's work on the medical side and get right into this
elementary school support, I believe we will make big inroads into the bush.
Having aircraft and communications of course is crucial to supporting these
missionaries and keeping up with what they are doing and feeding this
information back to the support base overseas.

Jack just on the communications issue, I am still struggling with what would
be the best equipment.
Can you look at the ACES satellite web page for me. There is equipment in
there that is inexpensive compared to a HF radio set up. The small phone
handsets are now around $750.00 USD. You can get a terminal now that will
send pre arranged text messages back to a web based central point. This is
normally used for asset tracking and comes complete with GPS which we would
not normally need. I feel this might help us get control of the operating
costs of this sort of network. If a missionary in the bush needs to talk to
us they can send us a text message and we can ring them from here on the sat
phone. The sat phone running costs are around 35c US per minute. If
conversations are kept short and to the point ( which I admit is hard in tok
pisin) I think the costs would be containable. ADRA is already contributing
books and materials towards these elementary schools. Perhaps they would
support a communications network that supports these guys. We may even be
able to get them to support an expat to develop the teacher training school
and oversea the training program and its implementation, visit the new
teachers on location and encourage and support them etc. (nudge nudge wink
wink)

ADRA has just opened an office here in Goroka. I hope to get time to go and
see the guys and get some more info as to where we and they can fit into
this.

God bless
Regards
Trevor

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