Loading the plane with bundles of Abaca fibers to be sold in town. The funds generated from these fibers will go to help buy medicine for the village. It also gives individuals a way to purchase goods from the church store.

Several years ago the Tala-andig tribal church decided to help improve the living conditions in their village. This was a complicated undertaking since they rarely leave the jungle and don’t have access to some of the basic things we do.  Among other things, they wanted a way to provide soap, salt and kerosene for lanterns at night for the people of their community. The decided to start a church store that would operate as a break-even endeavor and a service to the village. The store is run by the believers with the goal of facilitating a healthier lifestyle.

People in the community are able to harvest and process Abaca fibers from trees which grow wild in their valley. They take these fibers and bundle them (as seen in the photo above) so that they can be flown to town and sold. We average about one flight every two weeks to the Tala-andig and much of the cargo on these flights is for the church store and the rest for the missionaries. I can carry about 450 pounds of these fibers on nearly every return flight from the Tala-andig tribe so the otherwise empty flight is not wasted.

We are being used by the Lord to provide a means for the Tala-andig believers to improve their lifestyle and living conditions by providing access to these outside goods. The money obtained from selling the abacca fiber is used to buy the medicines out in town and also that is what the individual families use to buy what they need from the store in the village. As a result of having access to these things as a community they have a better quality of life with fewer sicknesses and are able to give more time to spiritual ministry because of this.

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Limited Edition "American Idol Pizza"

When we first arrived on Mindanao we were invited to go out to eat at a restaurant down the road with our friends. It was described to us as “good if you’ve lived here for a while.” At that time we hadn’t lived here long enough. It wasn’t very good, but it was edible. 1 1/2 years later, we found ourselves back in the same restaurant eating and enjoying the same food and debating about whether or not the ketchup was “real” or banana ketchup. That got us thinking, “what else have we adapted to that might be an indicator that we’ve been here a while?”

Here are ten things that we felt are indicators that “we might be a due for recalibration.”

1. We go to McDonald’s to get a good burger
2. We no longer flinch when passing around a corner on a mountain road.
3. We (actually just Brian) think that a Jolibee hotdog is nearly as good as anything else you eat in town.
4. We enjoy the “free” rice and meat breakfast buffet at some hotels (no continental breakfast here)
5. We can’t remember what a real pizza tastes like
6. We consider hotdogs a big treat for a 4th of July BBQ
7. We go to McDonald’s for good ice-cream.
8. We pick the bugs out of our food and keep eating without a second thought
9. We instinctively look in a prescription drug reference book and then research it online for recalls just to buy a decongestant or cough syrup.
10. We naturally allot a full day just to renew our vehicle registration – and realize that even that might not be enough.

It will be interesting to see just how far out of calibration we’ve become. I think we may be in for culture shock in reverse!

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In case it's been so long that you've forgotten what we look like. Here we are...one happy family!

It doesn’t take long to notice that we’ve been silent for about three months. We apologize. This would have been a very fun and interesting time to be sharing all the exciting things going on in our ministry, but after Dylan came home from the hospital we entered “survival mode.” On top of our normal, full-time ministry here and taking care of a newborn and a 2-year old, we had a few extra highlights in the last three months:

• Dylan was born and hospitalized in a provincial hospital for three days
• After we were all home from hospital Jenny Brennan (Bailey’s mom) came to visit and help out.
• We moved to our own house and unpacked just our essentials.
• Our only vehicle, our truck, needed a new engine and it took over 6 weeks (instead of the normal 2 weeks) to have a shop install one.
• Brian traveled to help prepare one of our planes to be flown from Northern Philippines to Southern so we could sell it and import a helicopter.
• Brian flew our Cessna 180 across the Philippines to Mindanao and worked hard with our partners at cleaning it up to sell.
• Brian and Garry (our chief pilot here) met with a buyer for our plane and negotiated its sale.
• The flight program on Mindanao got quite busy and Brian had an above average number 0f flights while Bailey flight followed.
• We installed a radio antenna on the house so Bailey could flight follow from home while watching the kids.
• We traveled as a family to Manila to process paperwork for Dylan and get some rest.
• The night we arrived in Manila, Brian took Maycie to the emergency room with a high fever and heart rate. It ended up just being nothing and she is back to normal now.
• Brian flew a lot more…
• We hired contractors to work on our house. They were more of a pain than a help and ended up stealing from us in the end.
• We picked up our truck and Brian had to spend a few days fixing what was overlooked or done wrong. Now we’re almost happy with it.
• We hired new contractors who another missionary here has had great sucess with. They worked nonstop for 3 weeks and did a great job.
• Just as flights were picking up our airplane received propeller damage in one of our airstrips during a training flight while our chief pilot was demonstrating a landing into an airstrip we hadn’t been to in months. No one was hurt, but the plane is grounded in the tribal location for several weeks.
• Brian and Garry hiked out of the tribe and got home the same day as the plane was damaged. It was a long day!
• We worked hard at organizing and preparing to make our scheduled flights “overland” in our Landcruiser. We are so thankful we had the engine replaced!
• Brian drove 620 miles, 190 of which was off road, to bring missionaries and tribal people in and out of two locations. The trip took 3 days and 35 hours of driving. (17 MPH average speed). Had we flown it would have taken about 1.5 hours of flight time.
• Bailey watched the kids and supervised the workers while Brian was away.
• The workers finished their work and we were finally able to unpack our office and put things away.
• We are organizing and preparing to change the engine and propeller in the tribal location where the airplane is sitting now. Needless to say this will be no luxury camping trip!
• Brian is keeping our truck prepared to drive supplies into the tribal locations that are accessible by road. It is rainy season and one of the roads is quite bad and very remote. An unmodified truck wouldn’t stand a chance at reaching these tribal locations when the roads are bad. We will likely make these trips a few more times before we are flying again.

We are most certainly forgetting some big details, but needless to say, we have been surviving and taking life one day at a time. With the kids at the stage they are in, it makes it even more difficult to be in such turmoil, but Bailey is amazingly holding everything together at home. However, we are still in survival mode and apologize for falling silent on communication. We will dig ourselves out and have some great stories to tell, even if it’s when we see you for Christmas in 2011!

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I Don’t know how to describe the celebration here, but this video might help. Make sure your sound is turned on to grasp the sheer quantity of explosions that welcomed the new year.

Many superstitions surround the coming of the new year, and fireworks and noise are believed to keep the bad spirits away so they will not bring bad luck to people in the new year. While many do fireworks just for fun, it is still a good “multimedia” reminder that behind the facade of happiness lies a need for the Savior and freedom from bondage to empty traditions and superstitions.

Just like their fireworks, misplaced hopes and beliefs soon go out with a bang and need something else to fill the void. Please pray for us and the missionaries here who are working hard to bring knowledge of a Savior so that the people might drink of the living water and never thirst again!

Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” John 4:13-14

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He tied a driveshaft to the bicycle and rode it through Manila!

Not long ago I was driving our truck on a trail that was pretty rough. I had forgotten to tie down the cooler and toolbox and other miscellaneous stuff in the cargo area of the truck after eating lunch, and low and behold when we got back on the trail it flew all over the place. Thankfully only one thing broke; my air compressor. It is, because Murphy works internationally, imported from the states and is a vital part of the tool  kit for the truck so I had to get it repaired. Having parts sent from the states wasn’t practical or affordable, so I decided to go to a machine shop and have one fabricated for around $7.

Much of my Tagalog practice has revolved around shops, and mechanics because often their English is quite poor. So far I haven’t had any surprises, like asking for an oil change and getting a glitter paint job. I was a bit concerned about this one cause it was a pretty foreign piece of machinery to them, but they got right to work doing what I had asked. As they carved out a new part on the lathe I sat and waited. While I waited I was entertained and amazed by their delivery guy who rode a bicycle. A machine shop delivery guy, not a pizza delivery guy, on a bicycle.

I was amazed when I first saw the rider show up with a couple of lower control arms off of what looked like a Toyota Corolla. Then, the next trip he brought a couple of front brake disc rotors from a full-sized truck that looked like they weighed over 100 pounds each. Keep in mind that he looked like he may have tipped the scales in triple digits after a good hard rain.

Then the most fascinating delivery of all was a drive shaft off of a box van. I was amazed at his ingenuity and boldness of riding his bike in Manila traffic with a driveshaft tied to the bike and resting between his legs. I don’t think I’d ever need an adrenaline rush again in my life if I had to ride that contraption through the insane maze of traffic that is Manila.

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Throughout my formal and informal aviation maintenance training, I have learned to respect gasoline. It can be a lot of fun when properly applied to a pile of furniture, or through a fuel injector into an engine. It can be absolutely deadly if not respected. Special care is always given when handling fuels to avoid fire hazards and explosions.

Recently I had reason to believe that my fuel tank in our truck had become contaminated with water. I took the truck to a shop to have them lower the fuel tank, clean it, and reinstall it. It was a Midas-type place that had good equipment and was recommended to me by a Filipino friend as a good place to have the work done. He was right, it was a great shop, they just followed some different safety standards than I was used to.

The mechanic started working and I was comfortable with how the work on the truck was going so rather than “supervise” I went off and ate breakfast and took care of some errands. I returned after lunch to see that the job was nearly complete, they needed only to bleed the fuel filter, and refill the tank.

As I walked around to the front of the truck I was shocked at what I saw. The mechanic was under the hood working and…smoking! He was, with his left hand, operating the primer pump on the still-soaked-in-diesel-fuel filter, and with his right hand only inches away, he steadied himself and held a smoldering cigarette.

He was soaked in diesel to his elbows from when he drained my fuel tank earlier in the day and didn’t seem to be bothered by the possibility that the entire vehicle could go up in flames if his cigarette ashed! I was grateful when he finished under the hood and hadn’t exploded. I was also relieved to see his cigarette was nearly consumed and would soon find its way to an ash tray.

We walked to the rear of the car where the refueling operation was taking place with a small homemade plastic funnel and some old oil jugs. Of course, there was a sizable puddle of diesel fuel on the ground where all the guys were standing. My smoking mechanic friend decided to get rid of his cigarette. As he approached the other guys who were standing in fuel, he threw his cigarette down to the ground, missing the puddle by about two inches, and stepped on it with his diesel soaked foot.

Thankfully diesel is much harder to ignite than gasoline so there was no accident. My heart rate came down sometime after lunch the next day and my truck seems to be doing great with its freshly cleaned tank. The work that was done was good, I just should have taken a longer lunch and avoided seeing the scary disregard for safety in the workplace.

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In February we purchased our first Philippine car here. It was a 1990 Landcruiser with over 210K Kilometers on it. Those would be Philippine kilometers, which are considerably more painful for a vehicle than normal kilometers. Amazingly, the vehicle was in beautiful condition (for its age) and the owner had taken good care of it. Nevertheless, it was in need of some repairs.

As I searched for a good shop here that could repair an imported Landcruiser I came across a few places here in the Manila area that have proved to be amazing resources. One of them is the 199 Off-Road House. Just the fact that they have a computer, let alone a website, is a major deal. Though this is a business for these guys, it is also their hobby. They go off-roading as a group at least once a month and so far I have been able to join them on a few of their trips. So far I have parked our truck when it gets muddy because I didn’t have adequate tires. This weekend, I plan to go for my first trip in the mud with our car, now that I found a modest set of mud tires for it.

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These trips are really good for me to learn how to drive in this kind of extreme mud environment from guys who consistently win the Philippine Tough Truck Challenge every year. They really know their stuff and are eager to bring us into their world of off-road. Of course, they are doing this for hobby, and we are seeing it as necessity to our ministry. However, while here in Manila it seems it is a lot more fun than necessity! While many of their vehicles are radical looking off road machines, they are also quite good at making a modest looking, very capable vehicle. This is very important to us since we already stand out enough in a crowd just by being American.

While we are in language school, I am trying to get the other students and missionaries to join us on these “off-road days” so that they can also learn some techniques that will no doubt come in handy during their time here in the Philippines. Some of our missionaries are accessible by muddy roads during parts of the year, so we are exploring the idea of expanding our ministry to over-land deliveries where there is no airstrip. We aren’t sure yet how practical it would be, but we do know that there are many areas on Mindanao, Luzon and Palawan that are inaccessible without a capable 4×4 and skills to match.

Our goal here is to enable the Gospel to go where it has never been before. Currently we are using highly modified airplanes in an off-road environment. It is getting more and more difficult to acquire land here for airstrips and right now the helicopter will only be able to cover one region. We are trying to think outside the box a little to see if this may be a need we can meet overland when airplanes are not an option. Or Maybe it would be best as a temporary solution while new tribal works await a helicopter program. Maybe we can supply them by land for a couple years so they can get started with language study while we wait for a flight program in their area? We don’t know what is best, but at the end of the day we are here to expand the reach of the Gospel and assist the missionaries no matter what it takes.

Please pray for us as we explore new ideas that we would not be too locked into using airplanes that we discredit other ideas. Also that we would not let our new excitement and fun with 4×4 trails cloud our judgment. Pray that we will be able to make decisions in the interest of what is best for the tribal people awaiting the news that they have a savior.

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This week Bailey and I bought a car here in Manila. I always get quite nervous about buying a used vehicle, probably because my budget always requires me to buy something with high miles, that has been well seasoned. This time was especially stressful since I don’t speak much Tagalog (yet) and the paperwork process is very foreign to me. Once we decided on the car we want to buy, we paid the owner in cash. This was quite a pile of cash since the largest denominations available are the equivalent of a $20 bill. Once payment was made, we started the process of changing the registration over to my name.

The first thing we did was get the Bill of Sale notarized. No big deal, except they needed to see a “tax certificate” which I didn’t have. So we left the notary office in search of someone who could issue this certificate. We found the place and waited for the registrar to show up to work. We were issued our certificates, then returned to the notary and waited about 45 minutes for the papers to be notarized. With our papers in hand, we went to get the vehicle emissions tested. We pulled into a shop and the car passed the test without any trouble. The same emissions shop sold us liability insurance for the vehicle which is also required for registration. There was one policy to choose from so it was pretty easy to decide what to do.

From there it was off to the Police headquarters where we needed to have the vehicle inspected. The inspection station was a tent in a lot paved with rubble from some demolished structure. There was a pile of trash burning nearby, and we sat in the outside waiting room and waited for the inspection. There was a whole stack of paperwork to be done and it was quickly processed and we made our payment. Then we waited over an hour and a half for our change. Once we received our change we stood in another line and showed our paperwork and receipt to an official who then carried them across the rubble lot to someone else who signed them 30 minutes later.

With these documents now in our hands we had to switch the registration papers. So we got in the car and drove two and a half hours to the provincial office where the vehicle was originally registered. It was at this office that we transfered the ownership of the vehicle to my name. We waited one and a half hours for them to call my name and tell me that they cannot register it because the owner’s signature on the bill of sale did not match his signature on the registration certificate which he signed more than 8 years ago. In one signature he signed with his full name and the other he left out his middle initial. At this point I would have been hung out to dry if it weren’t for the owner being by side for this whole process.

He then had to fill out paperwork to put a new signature on file so that they could clear my paperwork. Once they had the updated signature we waited another hour and the paperwork was done. We drove all the way home and I arrived back at the house at 10:30pm, only 16 1/2 hours after I left to start the process. When it was all said and done I decided that I would never again complain about the line at the California Department of Motor Vehicles! I don’t know what I would have done without the owner there with me the whole way. Normally the buyer is just left to fend for himself.

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I love coffee. Anyone who has been around me for long knows that I really, really like to drink coffee. I don’t drink much, just a cup in the morning and sometimes another later in the day. I don’t drink it for the caffine, but for the wonderful taste! Of course, the caffine is a nice side-effect… Coffee haters, don’t know what they’re missing. Anyway, I have come across something that I once thought was urban legend, but I now know fully well that it is very real, very good, and very gross.

If you have seen the movie "The Bucket List" you know just what I am talking about. I’m talking about a coffee that is so rare, and so expensive that only the elite of coffee connoisseurs ever get to taste it.  What is it? It is known best as Kopi Luwak and sells for up to  $100 per cup or $600 per pound.

There is a nocturnal cat, called a Civet, that lives in the jungles of South East Asia. These cats were once considered by plantation owners to be a nuisance because they would only eat the ripest and best coffee cherries off the coffee trees. Farmers have since discovered that the cat is unable to digest the beans. It "processes" the ripe fruit and then deposits it in little piles for coffee farmers to find. The farmers harvest the beans from the pile, remove the undigested parchment that is still covering the green coffee bean, and roast them. Annually there are less than 1000 pounds of this stuff harvested and put on the market.

It is arguably one of the best coffees in the world, and one of the most rare drinks in the world. Many would think that it ought to be rare if not extinct! It is thought that the enzymes in the cat’s digestive tract along with the fact that the cat only picks the best beans are the reason this makes such good coffee. It sounds pretty gross to me, but as a coffee lover, I can’t help but want to try it.

So how is a missionary like me ever going to get to try something so extravagant? Recently I ventured into one of our tribes to do some work for the missionaries there. In talking with them I discovered that a major trade item for the tribe is coffee. I enjoyed their coffee every morning while we were there. It was so fresh and rich…I truly looked forward to every morning when Robbie would bring me my coffee!

Then one morning I asked if I could buy some coffee and take it with me. Robbie told me that I could, but there were two kinds for two prices. The kind I was drinking was "in season" and cost about $2 per kilo. I couldn’t believe it! That was less than $1 per pound. Then she said there is the expensive kind that sells for around $10 per kilo ($4.50 per pound). She proceded to tell me about this rare tree cat that eats the berries off the trees and…

So today Robbie came through and in my house is 1 kilo of "Kape Alamid," or more commonly known as Kopi Luwak. I first heard about this kind of coffee over a year ago and really wanted to try it, (and wanted to throw up all at once) but I knew it was way to rich for my blood. Now I have 1/500th of the world’s supply of it for less than half the price of coffee at Starbucks! I guess "when you live by faith, you have to take what the Lord gives you…even if it’s a "Poo Brew."

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After over a month of waiting, “ghost month” ended this week, and our landlord was able to sign our contract and arrange for repairs to be completed so we can move in. Brian painted the main rooms yesterday, and the work crew should be there this week to do the repairs and remodeling that is necessary. Praise the Lord! Things feel like they are moving again!

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