Busy Monday

Today we all started early as there were loads of people at the hangar at 7:00am instead of the usual 8:00am. Most of the people were various staff members of Compassion International. You may recognize that name from their heart-wrenching commercials on TV about children all over the world that need a helping hand. We flew about 5 flights of people and cargo into the jungle so the staff members could prepare for a week of church camp for these Compassion kids. We will be flying them all back out in about a week. In the meantime we will be transporting some of the Compassion kids to the camp location called Mashient. Most walk or come in a boat, but there are some that would never get there if they didn't have the airplane. I know that my weeks at church camp as a junior high and high schooler helped soldidify and grow who I am in Christ today. It is a privelege to be able to be part of bringing this same "church camp experience" to some special kids that most people forget about.

After we got all the planes in the air, I was busy working on paperwork and other logistics in preparation for our trip tommorow to Quito. We are leaving tommorow in the afternoon so that I can be there Wednesday morning to get my flight physical done. I will also be doing some written exams hopefully that afternoon, as well as most of Thursday. Needless to say it may be Friday or later before we finally make it back to our house. Although I have a lot of work to do and studying to catch up on, I am really grateful to be in this position - finally pursuing my Ecuadorian pilots licenses.

This afternoon we had a few medevac flights. This man seen above was in bad shape. He was flown out from the jungle a few weeks ago by us, and his condition never improved. So the local mission hospital asked us to fly him to Quito where there is more advanced care. It is hard to say whether he will make it or not. I know that without us, he wouldn't have had a chance at all a few weeks ago and again today. Usually we "track" our patients that we fly out, because they are either in the mission hospital here in Shell, or down the road 7 miles in Puyo. Typically after a few days, or sometimes a few weeks, we fly the patient back home. When they go to Quito we lose track of them because we don't have any dedicated staff persons to check in on them like we do here in Shell. Assuming the patient gets well enough to leave the hospital, they sometimes will return(at least to Shell) by bus.

I went on another medevac flight that got called in right at the last minute. The pilot, Kevin, made the decision to give it a try and fly out to the village of Ipiak and get a snake bite victim that was already vomiting and convulsing. That is an indication of a lot of venom in the bloodstream. After flying for 50 minutes we arrived at the airstrip and tried to land. On the first approach we were unable to land due to rain on the windshield. We couldn't see a thing! So we went around for another try, this time landing in the other direction when there wasn't any rain. The visibility was great on that end, but we had a honkin' tailwind, which made us too fast to safely land. So we did another go around and headed back to Shell without landing, and left the snake bite victim in the jungle for the night. These are the toughest decisions that we have to make. Kevin, the pilot, did the right thing for many reasons. If we were able to eventually land, we wouldn't have had enough time after loading the man to return to Shell due to the closure of the Shell airport at sunset. There was also strong approaching weather almost over the strip, which presumably would have delayed our departure even more. Once again, assuming we could have made it out of Ipiak, we wouldn't have made it back to Shell, and we would have had to stay the night somewhere in the jungle. We would have been out of our element, and our patient that we would have been trying to help would still be without medical care, and now without his family. So Kevin made the right, albeit hard, decision to return to Shell where we landed just before sunset and the airport closure. Keep this patient and those like him in prayer that they can hold on until we can get them to medical care. It does little good giving into the stress and pressure to get a patient out only to make matters worse by becoming a victim yourself or having an accident.