Last week we departed the U.S. on Friday and arrived in Tarakan, Indonesia on Monday. Our MAF team was there to meet us at the airport. Our in-country expat team here currently includes six families, including ourselves and the other new teacher couple. Our awesome team has been enfolding us into life here by showing us around the island and providing meals and company for this first week. The school (and the apartment where we will live) is being completely renovated, but the start date for Ms. Emely’s classes are a week from Monday. The kids have started some of their classes at home, so if the building isn’t ready yet, that is a backup option until everything at the school is finalized.
It’s hard not to skip right to the highlight stories and to pass over the day-to-day errands that we’ve been doing since we’ve arrived. With the help of the finance worker at the MAF office (Herman), we got cell phone plans, opened up bank accounts, registered for an Indonesian tax ID, and signed up for the Indonesian health care system. We also met with the community leader in our neighborhood, went to a new church on Sunday, found cool places to eat out at, and had dinners with our MAF coworkers. We attended our Indonesian language classes, signed up for a gym (and Emely went to a Zumba class), and I put up our little personal weather station. And finally, my personal highlights have been my quiet times on the patio, and walks around the neighborhood.
Through our conversations this week with our new team, we’ve gotten a small glimpse into the long, important legacy MAF has here in Kalimantan. In the hangar office, a long wall shows pictures and tells the story of five decades of flight support in Kalimantan. That history has built the current reality of flight support that is regular, routine, and ongoing. In total, this week’s flights included three medevac patients, a theology master’s student, transport of a body for funeral ceremonies, and a survey for a possible new landing strip.
What a packed week of flying! Each of these people and those flights has its own incredible story to unpack, but support like this is so regular and routine that it forms a steady stream of life-saving, community transforming accounts that add up over time to create a real testimony of how God is meeting people here in a special and unique way. Wednesday, for example, started off with a request to transport a body to multiple locations for funeral ceremonies. In the midst of this response to a specific need of great importance for a community grieving loss, help was requested for two medevac patients along the route – one a woman who was suffering pregnancy complications, and another a small boy who had sustained a head injury. The deceased man’s life was celebrated in two separate locations and then the two medevac patients were taken to a hospital in a nearby town where they were able to receive medical care.
Make the total four medevac patients. As I was composing this update on Saturday, I received a text message from the pilot on standby inviting someone to ride along on a medical transport flight from the nearby town of Malinau to our base here in Tarakan. I had about 10 minutes until the pickup for the flight to collect my gear for photography and video, but I recorded the trip and made a short video about it.
All good for a first week, before the “real work” begins. The “real work” is probably going to be grading papers, meeting students’ needs, upgrading operating systems and installing conference call equipment. But it’s also connected to what we saw this first week, and at church on Sunday – building a larger story of God’s work in this side of the world.