Last flying before Christmas…
On their last flying day before Christmas, Ryan and his fellow pilot Mathias, stopped to pose for us in front of their airplanes!
Welcome to 2021!
Wishing you a very happy new year. May 2021 be filled with laughter, good memories and lots of time with the people you love!
It is unlikely we will be able to leave PNG this year, but we look forward to hopefully visiting many of you next year.
God bless,
Ryan, Shiv & Ray the dog!
Crocodile for dinner?
A lovely friend of ours, Helen in Wewak, on the north coast of PNG, recently sent us an eski (cool box) full of tropical fruit, including Kulau (Young Pineapples, great for drinking), pineapples and avocados. She also included a surprise, some Crocodile Tail fillets.
Helen assured me you cook them just like chicken…
Rainbow over Telefomin
On one of my (Ryan’s) last flying days before Christmas, I was on a turn-around, having just dropped off a load of passengers in Telefomin and about to take another load out again, when I spotted this rainbow hanging over our home!
Merry Christmas from PNG!
Ryan, Shiv & Ray would like to wish you all, wherever you are in the world, peace, joy and God’s presence this Christmas time. May 2021 be filled with love and hope for you and all those you care for!
Telefomin Base Christmas Party
We celebrated Christmas as a Telefomin Team with most of the families together. We shared lunch topped off with a big treat of ice cream! As none of our local colleagues have fridges or freezers this was a big novelty. Our Base Manager, Lucy, brought a big box from Mt Hagen and we stored it in the freezer of our empty transit house before cracking it open for the celebration.
Christmas Pineapple
This is the Pineapple which we just plucked from our own garden!
Ryan planted it around 2 years ago, and it decided to ripen, just in time for Christmas, although by the time you are reading this it will have already been eaten! ;-)
Wewak Aircraft Visiting
Although we have our own aircraft in Telefomin, our colleagues based in Wewak, on the north coast of PNG, fly passengers and cargo down to us on a weekly basis.
Here they are taking off with a full load of passengers, heading north, back home to the ocean breeze.
Ryan is just about to load his passengers to head south-west to Kiunga to drop off passengers and bring fuel back to Telefomin.
Telefomin Family
We are very blessed, living in Telefomin!
This is some of our local family who help us maintain the gardens and look after the MAF houses.
We don’t have time to maintain the MAF gardens and clean the empty houses, so these lovely people come and help us regularly, and bless us with their time, skills and friendship.
Getting the Grass Cut
We are responsible for cutting our own grass and looking after the garden in the MAF transit house next door.
This lovely team came from Ankem Church, just down the road from us, and worked for 3 hours to tidy all the fiddly bits using bush knives. And they didn’t even do it for money!
It’s hot work!
Whilst you, in the northern hemisphere, are all pulling on your gloves and woolly hats, here in the tropics the weather hasn’t changed much!
In Telefomin it often gets up to around 28 degrees C in the middle of the day, but we’re almost a mile high in the mountains. Our local friends call Telefomin “cold place”. Ryan daily flies to airstrips lower in altitude, the lower he gets, the hotter it gets, and sadly he rarely gets the pleasure of landing by the ocean and enjoying a nice sea breeze.
In the picture you can see him chugging back water, with a very sweaty back. This is the same for him all-year-round in PNG!
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Day of Prayer
As a Christian organisation, every 6 months MAF holds a day of prayer, when we stop flying and all of our work, to ask God to guide everything we do.
Back at the start of Nov, we had both our full-time and part-time MAF team in Telefomin, come round our house to pray and share lunch.
Advanced Airstrip Training
There are only 2 training pilots currently in PNG and, thanks to COVID, it is really hard to get any others in country. As such, we didn’t think Ryan would be able to get his Advanced Airstrip Training (AAT) done this year. However, Ryan’s boss, Brad (pictured), the Flight Operations Manager, decided that getting Ryan through this training and able to fly into a few more airstrips was high priority.
Brad kindly left his family in Goroka and came to Telefomin for 2 nights to train Ryan towards the end of Nov. So now Ryan is able to fly to more locations and help more remote & isolated people. Thanks Brad!
Shiv’s Birthday Celebration
My birthday’s on Tuesday this year, so we celebrated a little early as Ryan is flying on Tuesday and we don’t have any expat neighbours for me to have a birthday tea party with.
As I expected, no post from overseas arrived in time, although I know some is coming! However, my Parents-in-Law sent my birthday card with us from Canada and I have some wonderful friends in PNG who sent me cards and gifts.
So, even though this was an unusually quiet birthday with no friends around, I feel throughly spoilt and extremely blessed, thanks mostly to my wonderful husband!
Sweet Treats you just can’t buy!
I love cooking and making delicious things in the kitchen, and with limited selection from the grocery stores, which are a flight away, it’s a good thing too!
Whilst we were out of PNG, we hid my Kombucha SCOBY in the back of a dark cupboard and I was relived to discover it survived! Whilst in Hagen some friends offered us blueberry & cinnamon Kombucha, which was delicious. I found frozen blueberries in the chiller in one of the stores in Hagen (a rare and valuable find!), so I thought I’d try it. The result is a resounding success and will be repeated often, so long as I have blueberries in my freezer!
Unexpected Guests
Last month, we had Fiona, our Finance Manager, plan to pay us a visit in Telefomin for 2 nights. As we had 2 members of our Maintenance Team staying in the MAF transit house, I arranged for Fiona to stay in one of my absent neighbours’ houses. We like to provide a meal to our MAF visitors, and as Fiona is Gluten intolerant, I made Pumpkin Soup & Gluten Free bread. Then, mid-afternoon, Ryan called me over the radio (the mobile reception was out!) to tell me that the Wewak pilots (Brad & Andy, pictured) were stuck on the ground in Eliptamin waiting for the weather to clear up. Their flying programme had them coming to Telefomin next and as they had been on the ground for so long, it was likely they would run out of daylight and not be able to make it home to Wewak…
Re-living our Dating Days
When we were living in Mt Hagen and dating back in 2016, we used to go to the “Kofi Kave” for lunch time dates occasionally. There aren’t many options to go out when you’re dating in Mt Hagen, so we had to make the most of every opportunity. They have a lovely fish pond and a small aviary so it felt like a like a little piece of paradise just a short walk from the hustle-and-bustle of the airport.
There are NO dating options outside our house in Telefomin, so when we were staying in Hagen back in October, we thought we would pop back to the Kofi Kave for a date-lunch!
Maintenance Blessing
A couple of hard working men from our MAF Maintenance Department came to Tele for 2 weeks in October. They did lots of important jobs, like putting liners in our neighbour’s water tanks, putting a concrete cover over a septic tank, fixing rotten stairs, fixing roof leaks. There was a lot of priority work to be done as they were unable to come out earlier in the year due to COVID.
In amongst all the priorities, I asked them if they could please fix my path, from my back door to my outdoor laundry area, but only if they had time and enough cement left. (All the cement had to be flown in!) Thankfully, they found some time and I now have a smooth path which does not have weeds growing or puddles on it when it rains. It’s a minor thing, but it will make doing laundry just a little easier for me!
Thank you Graham & Wesley, and the Maintenance Team!
New Street Lights in Mt Hagen
When we were in Mt Hagen last week, we drove home from the airport to town one evening to discover the brand new, solar street lights which line the road to the airport, were actually working!
The newly completed road leading to the Highway, which they are still working on, is so smooth to drive on, it’s such a treat compared to the pot-hole filled side roads. Let’s hope it lasts!
Click on the picture, left, to watch a video of our friend, Nurse Rhema, one of the local health care workers who MAF supports and we fly out of Telefomin.