Phone shots

I don't always have a camera with me, but I usually have my phone. These are some pictures I snapped with my phone over the past two weeks that give you a glimpse into daily life. When we're not flying, we still have a lot of other things to do to keep the planes flying and the program running. Sometimes we are in the office doing finances, flight scheduling or updating maintenance records. Other times, we are running around town to government offices or getting fuel for the planes. A lot of the time, we're doing maintenance or inspections on the planes. Last week, we ended up pulling one of the propellers completely apart. It had been leaking some oil. The prop company mailed us new oring seals from Germany to fix the leak. They arrived last week, so we spent a day and a half pulling the propeller apart. Thankfully, we sent Ian to Germany a few years back for training with the prop manufacturer. As a result, they gave us permission to do this work ourselves instead of sending the prop to Germany for the repair, which would have cost thousands of dollars and taken several months. The seal that needed to be changed was on a piston inside the prop hub behind the blades. Ed is cleaning the inside of the hub in this picture.


Here, Ian is cleaning the prop blades. You can see all the pieces on the table that go with each blade.


The day after we changed the seal on the prop, I flew 3 men to Galmi Hospital and spent the night. The men were with another organization that's working in some villages in that region teaching sanitation and hygiene. They also loan female goats to families at risk in the villages so they can start their own flocks. The female goat is then passed on to another family at risk to do the same thing. While meeting physical needs, they are also seeking to meet the spiritual needs of the people in these villages. I stayed at the hospital compound and checked out the construction projects. The original hospital buildings were built in the 1950s and are falling apart. The hospital is in the process of completely rebuilding everything. In this picture, you can see one of the old buildings on the right and the new surgical ward being built on the left. In the foreground, several workers are loading sand, gravel and cement mix into a mixer to mix cement. This is one site where we actually have a small cement mixer. Most cement mixing is done by hand on our other projects.


We have some great guys helping supervise the rebuild project this year. We'll need some more construction supervisors for the next stages next year.


At the same time, they are also building a new duplex on the hospital compound. The hospital has been blessed with more long term staff, but that also means they need more housing. Here you can see the walls going up on the duplex.



There are always lots of animals to see driving around the city. A few days ago, I was driving and saw these camels and some cows in the back of this flat bed truck. I got my phone out in time to catch the camels, but not the cows that were with them.


Over the weekend, we spent a morning relaxing down by the river. Some men from a nearby village were fishing not far away. You can see them casting their net into the water from their wooden pirogue.