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One of the air strips I have regularly flown into is Appa. I well remember the day we did the first test landing there. Accompanying me on that occasion was Les Anderson, who later became the director of Adventist Aviation based in Goroka. It can take ages for isolated bush people to get their airstrips open. Many years of back breaking work, with pick and shovel, moving the rocks, trees and stumps by hand are often needed. The area has to be leveled, drained, compacted and surfaced as an airstrip.
As and I taxied up into the parking bay after the first landing at Appa, with Les who had just arrived in the country at that time, the jubilation of the Appa villagers was sensational. They began wildly chopping down paw paw and banana trees and leaping in the air and shouting for joy. I will never forget the look on Les's face when the villagers picked him up, hoisted him in the air and carried him off on their shoulders round and round in un-quellible delight. A fitting welcome for one of the best missionaries I have ever had the pleasure of knowing it was too.
People in these isolated parts are so dependent on aircraft for basic services. Getting a teacher there, getting supplies of soap, salt and basic commodities, and of course medical services. By air is the only way of getting cash crops to market as well. Carrying these crops, gives the villagers a little money for educating their children and buying a few basic necessities. Participating in the lives of these isolated villagers in this way helps us as missionaries to get to know them and their needs. The fares and freight we charge, help keep the service running. Being there frequently gives the missionary pilot the opportunity of knowing about and being able to respond to the needs of the people. The story below illustrates this aspect of a missionary pilot's life.
Rubina comes from Dobu, a remote village on the southern edge of the Papua New Guinea Highlands. It is one of the last outposts you come to before you reach the south western Papuan jungles, which stretch for hundreds of square miles throughout the south of the country. Dobu is situated in an elongated basin with mountain ridges on 3 sides and steeply rising ground on the 4th side. There is a small airstrip tucked away in the bottom of the basin but it is a brave pilot indeed who takes off with much of a load. High altitude, short runway and a take off into rising terrain! Every pilot's nightmare. After take off you have to immediately veer to the left and follow a narrow short ravine while you claw for height to get above the rising ground in the main part of the basin to your right hand side. Then you circle around in the basin until you have enough height to get out and over the lip at the side. Pilots avoid going in there if they can help it, consequently only an occasional mission plane visits Dobu.
Rubina is a normal active girl around 12 years old. I say around 12 because she like many people in remote villages in Papua New Guinea does not know her birth date or exactly how old she is. About 12 months before, Rubina fell in the bush and sustained a nasty compound fracture of her lower left leg. She lay there for a while sobbing with the pain and feeling very frightened about not being able to move her right leg. "How would she get home," she thought, "and what was going to happen to her leg?" Her friend was scurrying through the jungle to find her father. After what seemed like forever, Rubina's Dad came into the clearing. "How good it was to see him at last," she thought. He bent over her and tenderly examined her leg. There was a long jagged piece of bone protruding ominously out the shin area, and oh so much blood. He picked her up and carried her to their simple bush material house, where her mother was busily going about the chores of their subsistence life style. He placed her on the mat and stood there listening to her cry uncontrollably with the pain and watching the blood trickle down her leg. What was he to do. There is no clinic in Dobu to give any kind of treatment for even the most basic ailments, let alone for a complicated surgical condition like this one. Rubina's mum reached for a dirty, torn old tee shirt and carefully wrapped it around the bleeding leg and the large jagged piece of bone protruding from the torn flesh. Little by little the bleeding finally stopped. Exhausted Rubina finally fell into a light sleep. Her Dad went outside into the cool evening air and sat on a log. He swatted the malarial mosquitoes instinctively, as he sat there deep in thought, wondering what he could do for his suffering little Rubina.
The mining company had moved on and there was no radio to call for help anymore. Not that there is much help at the other end of a radio for bush people in PNG these days. "Oh what could he do," he thought. Should he take her to Negabo the nearest bush clinic? It was miles away over rough mountain trails and she was already in so much pain. No he would wait and hope that an aircraft would come to Dobu. Yes an aircraft would come and they would help her, he was sure of it.
Day after day Rubina lay there with her leg throbbing from the injuries and the subsequent rampant wound infection and osteomyelitis. Her body was weak from the loss of blood. Day after day her family watched the sky and listened for the sound of an aircraft engine, hoping a plane would come to take Rubina to the medical help she desperately needed. Days turned into weeks. No plane came. The pain and the infection were weakening Rubina further.
As she lay there with her leg bound up, very slowly the Fibula -the smaller leg bone behind the tibia or shin bone, began to knit together. At last she could move her leg without it hurting so much. Days of fever came and went. Little by little her body started to feel a bit stronger. Somehow her immune system was holding its own against the raging tropical infection. As the days passed she began putting more and more weight on her injured leg. It gradually grew stronger and so did she. The broken shin bone was still sticking out of her leg and catching on her clothes as she moved.
Then the fevers started again and oh how the leg pained. In a few days the pain subsided and the fevers went away once more. By now Rubina's dad began to realize that a plane may not come for a long time. Something had to be done for Rubina. Now that she was a little bit stronger he decided to set out for Negabo health clinic. It was slow going for Rubina as she hobbled laboriously along the bush trail through the rainforest and the mud. Oh how the leg burned with pain from infection and the inflammation caused by the constant trauma of the broken shin bone edge still inside her leg jabbing her tender flesh as she limped along. Many times as she stopped to rest, she wondered if she would ever make it to Negabo.
Then at last up on the next ridge, Negabo came into view. The aid post orderly frowned as he summed up the situation. There was very little he could do for Rubina there at Negabo. She needed to be flown out to a critical care hospital and have surgery. Negabo airstrip was closed -again. One of the operators who operates larger aircraft closes the strip when ever it is a bit boggy or rough for their big aeroplanes. Unfortunately "closing" the strip means that smaller planes like the ones most missionary pilots fly, are not allowed to land there either. The down side is though, that while the strip is closed, the medical clinic is isolated and planes don't call in for urgent medical cases.
Rubina and her dad waited and waited while the strip was repaired. The infection flared up again. The aid post orderly had a small supply of oral antibiotics. She was given two courses in all. Unfortunately they did not have any antibiotics with good bone penetration to give her any way.
His face fell as Rubina's dad heard the news. The Chimbu government did not have any money left in the budget to assist villagers who needed medical evacuations. This was a real blow. The clinic had been told to make patients as comfortable as possible and that's the best they could do. Most flying operators -even some with missionary labels, rarely help ill villagers to get to medical help unless they can pay a full fare. Anyone who is really sick, needs a family member to travel with them as well, to look after their needs while they are in the hospital system. So this cost is a double whammy for them. He was only a simple subsistence farmer and did not have anywhere near the 250 Kina odd needed to get both he and Rubina to Goroka. Had she survived this much, had they come so far to fail in their quest for healing and restoration now?
As they sat despondently turning the situation over and over, back and forth in subdued discussion, the villagers looked over at Rubina sitting forlornly with her hurting leg. They began telling stories about how one mission was different to the others and often helped desperately ill villagers who could not pay.
They enthusiastically told Rubina's Dad about one mama from Negabo who had incompletely miscarried had been slowly bleeding to death. The clinic at Negabo was told by the health office in Kundiawa to make her as comfortable as possible and let her die. They had no money to do a medevac for her.
-Seeing people suffer and die because they cannot afford available treatment really stirs the heart of the missionary pilot. My medical training told me that this lady had a good chance of getting better and having a healthy full life if only she could get the right treatment. This poor woman had several living healthy children but was now unable to complete any pregnancy. She had recently had 5 miscarriages!! Her system was obviously very run down and depleted. I often get to look after dying people as a nurse in my other job back home. In those cases people only arrive at that point when there is nothing more that can be done for them. Here I was looking at an otherwise healthy person who was slowly dying of something that could be treated. As a missionary pilot I had the chance of uplifting and connecting this helpless soul to the treatment that would save her life.
Rubina's Dad listened intently as he heard how we loaded the plane with the bags of coffee the villagers wanted us to take to market and then gently laid this dying woman on top of the bags. My wife Lorretta who is a trained mid wife took her over to the hospital and made sure she got seen to straight away. She could only speak her local language, but fortunately one of the medical interns could speak that particular one, of the 700 plus languages in PNG. It was a pleasure for me to take her back home not long after that, a happy healthy smiling individual again with life's potential restored. That is exactly what Jesus did for people. How does a missionary pilot feel when he can do work like this? Its just great.
A spark of hope now illuminated the shadowy landscape of Rubina's Dad's troubled thoughts. Perhaps there was a God who really did care for His suffering hurting creation after all. But would the mission plane help Rubina? The mission's radio from Negabo airstrip had been taken up to Goroka for repairs some time before. How could they contact the mission? The airstrip was closed anyway.
Then someone remembered hearing that the mission was helping the Appa villagers nearby carrying their coffee to Goroka. That was it, they would walk on and try to get to Appa. May be the mission pilot would take pity on them and they would find help at last.
I remember sighing with satisfaction as I trimmed Charlie for the descent from one zero thousand into Appa. It was a beautiful cool morning and the atmosphere was calm and stable. Shallow wisps of cloud hovered around the mountain slopes and lounged benignly about in the valleys after the bustling storms of the evening before. I was unaware that today, just being there, being a part of this village communities daily life, was going to be one of those days where God opens up the opportunity to show his love in a special way to someone who needed that so much.
When I landed, the people told me they had a sick person. Curious I asked to see Rubina. As she stood quietly and nervously before me, I quickly scanned her little frame looking for a clue to what the problem might be. Nothing obvious presented itself, so I asked what was wrong with her. Her father lifted the hem of her dress to show me. Wow! I have worked in charge of a casualty ward and have seen quite a bit of horrible looking stuff. I was taken aback however when I saw Rubina's leg. There sticking out of her leg, half way  down from her knee was the 3 or 4 inch length of her tibia bone surrounded by a large area of angry looking, infected flesh. On closer examination I could see that infection had eroded a large section of the bone. As I was told the story of what had happened, my mind boggled as I tried to assimilate that this poor kid had been carrying this very large open wound for such a long time. How had she escaped dying of Septicemia? I marveled at the power that the Creator has put within created life to adjust to and fight back against the hazards sin has brought into the world. "This kids immunoglobulin would definitely worth bottling," I thought, as she sat down again on Charlies right main wheel.
There was silence for a moment as I incredulously went over the story again in my head. Rubina's Dad began fidgeting nervously and looking at the ground. Rubina was looking up at me with her dark brown eyes in perfect trust. She must have read something in my face that her father didn't see. Thinking I was weighing up if I would help them or not, one of the villagers offered 2 coffee bags to help pay for getting Rubina to hospital. Rubina's Dad had 40 Kina which he offered to give me. I shook my head and refused to take the 40 Kina. I knew he would need that to look after her when they got to Goroka. I accepted the villagers offer of the 2 coffee bags however, remembering what state the mission's finances are in.
As I flew home there was a hint of a smile on Rubina's Dad's face as he sat there up front beside me. I looked back out the window at the Nomane range slipping by underneath and wondered with admiration at the stamina and perseverance of this poor family who had overcome all the odds that bush people face in PNG and had found the source of help that God has provided for them in their need. "What though," I thought, of the other thousands of villagers hidden away in isolated villages dotted all over Papua New Guinea? How will they be able to get access to the missionary support services and the gospel ministry they need, to uplift and bring new life to them? But at least Rubina now has the chance of getting the treatment she needs. Wont you join me in praying that God will open the way for this kind of service to be available to the many other village kids like Rubina, who are suffering in other remote areas of Papua New Guinea?
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