Friends,
I´ve finally posted photos. They will run as a slideshow at the top, or you can click on the slideshow to go directly to the album. You must go directly to the album if you wish to see the descriptions I made for each photo. They are ordered by subject but not chronologically. Enjoy!
If you are reading this on facebook, go to http://www.missionpilotscott.blogspot.com/ to view the photos.
God Bless,
Scott Sterling
June 26, 2011
June 14, 2011
More News
Friends,
I haven´t communicated in about a month, so here´s what´s going on:
Min made it back safely on her trip, and with presents! We had four missionaries request special items from the United States, and we had our own list of things. Nutritional Yeast Flakes, Insoles, McKay´s Chicken Seasoning, raw cashews, vegetarian jerkey, italian seasoning and rechargable batteries were among the requests. She said Pearl´s wedding was great, and she brought back a hand-carved pair of giraffes made in Africa that each guest was given. (Apparently the bride´s family bought them in Africa and brought them to the U.S. for the wedding).
Cooking had been a bit stressful for Min. She had been cooking 3 meals a day which meant getting up at 6am to get breakfast going, followed by a cleanup, worship, a two-hour break and then get started on lunch. After cleaning up lunch she was off for 3 hours and then started dinner... finally finishing her day at 7:30pm! If she did laundry on her breaks she would have a 12-hour day. Thanks to a missionary named Carmen who came to visit, we´ve adopted a new schedule and Min´s very happy. She now only cooks breakfast and lunch, and is off Saturday and Sunday. She also wanted to cook meals just for me and her, so I bought a gas cookstove and put it in our little kitchen. We´ve cooked one meal on it so far!
We have an airplane! It´s not for very long, but we´ve been granted permission to use our Cessna 182 Turbo for 1 month, ending June 27. Apparently when you bring an American airplane to Bolivia, you either pay 30% of it´s Bolivian-estimated value as an import tax, or you ask permission to fly it as an American airplane. Since the second option is free, we´ve been doing that on all our planes for about a year. Sadly, it´s getting more difficult to get permission, and we think they are pressuring us to import them. This amounts to $16,000 per plane and we have at least 5. We´ll see what God does. It´s been 6 months since we´ve had permission to use an airplane so we haven´t gotten many calls yet, as people are just becoming aware that it is available. We´ve taken a pastor out to San Joaquin to work in a village for a month, and Friday we brought David Harding out to Familia Feliz orphanage in Rurrenabaque, Boliva. David´s daughter started the orphanage. We also brought them 30 or so baking pans for making bread, and took a man home to see his family who had been in the hospital in Santa Cruz. It seems that there are other mission pilot organizations in Bolivia, so we just work one area that no-one else serves, called The Beni. It is mostly jungle with few passable roads. You can read about it at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beni_Department . I´m learning to communicate to air traffic control in Spanish. Technically English is the official language of aviation worldwide, but that doesn´t apply in small regional airports in Bolivia. I had a fellow pilot tell me sometimes they can understand ATC´s Spanish better than he can their English! It´s very difficult for me, but it´s coming slowly. Herman, one of our pilots, told me even though he is fluent in Spanish, they sometimes use terminology with him that baffles him. So I´ve got a big learning curve to meet!
Another project here is the runway. We have a grass runway prepared on the property right where we live. Right now it´s 550 meters long (about 1800 feet) and ultimately we plan to extend it to 1200 meters. So far it´s been smoothed by a tractor dragging a large log up and down it, and good grass has been planted. Now we´re working on the requirements to get it certified for use. We need runway beginning and end markers, markers on the sides every 50 meters, and a windsock. Last week and this week we finished the markers. Being in Bolivia, we opted for large PVC pipes to mark the ends, and buried tires painted white for the 50 meter markers. I think in total we spent less than $50 so far.
On a sad note: Red ADvenir, our Spanish TV network is off the air. We´ve been waiting on some donated funds for some months now and praying, but finally we had to cease transmitting our signal last week. I hear that sufficient funds have been donated to keep us on the air, but they were sent from another country, through the U.S. and the funds are tied up in the U.S. Maybe the U.S. government thinks it´s drug money... or, more likely, Satan doesn´t want our station on the air. Just a week before this, we had a fire break out in our most critical computer room. Richard (the station manager) called the station watchman to tell him that he wasn´t receiving the signal. The volunteer watchman went out side and saw smoke coming from the transmission room! Apparently a power surge had started an electrical fire and the main power cable was fried. The fire had started underneath the signal amplifier, a $70,000 piece of equipment needed for transmitting the signal to the satellite that needed to be imported from the U.S.. By God´s grace, all that needed to be replaced was the fried power cable. The signal amplifier was completely undamaged. Within 6 hours the signal was back on the air.
A couple of good things are coming out of our current situation: Richard has had plans for relocating some of our equipment to better serve the station and aid expansion in the future. This project requires us to be off of the air, so we are going forward with it now. Another possible blessing is in working with the Seventh-day Adventist conference in Bolivia. In the past, it seems, our ministry has been regarded as a nusance and we have not had a good working relationship with the conference. However, new leaders have been appointed to the conference positions here in Bolivia, and they have already come to visit the station and extend the hand of fellowship. Here´s where the opportunity comes in: Even though we are off the satellite, we still have several TV station licenses around Bolivia. These stations were receiving our signal via satellite, and re-transmitting it via cable or over-the-air waves. The conference has an official TV station in South America called ¨Nuevo Tiempo¨. We can work together at this time by telling our TV stations to receive the Nuevo Tiemo signal via satellite and transmit it in place of Red ADvenir for now. That seems to be the plan, and in the meantime we´ll prepare for when we can be back on the air again, should God re-open that door.
Thank you for praying for us! Please pray for the station, the aviation program, the other missionary efforts here in Bolivia, and that Min and I would continue to be a blessing here.
God Bless,
Scott Sterling
Scott Sterling
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