Brian and Bailey Pruett Serving in the Philippines with Aviation Making a Home
We are so blessed to have such a nice home in a quiet neighborhood. There is even a park just around the corner from us where our kids love to play.
We finally made it to California after quite a long sprint to-the-finish in the Philippines. We were very pleased to leave a fully functional flight program in the capable hands of Joel and Missy Davis. The transition took a lot of work, but we were able to make the switch without any interruption in flight service at a time when a lot is going on in the ministries that we support with the airplane. We praise the Lord for a safe checkout for Joel and for safety in Brian’s final flights. Thank you for praying for us, we feel we were able to finish well.
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PDF It’s a Another Boy!
Shortly after our new baby is born Maycie will turn 4, and Dylan will turn 2 years old.
We are back in California and getting used to living in the States again. There are so many things we are really enjoying and not the least of them is being able to choose a Doctor and hospital for the delivery of our third baby. During Bailey’s recent appointment we had another ultrasound and can now say with confidence, “It’s a boy”! We are really excited to have a brother on the way for Dylan and we look forward to watching Maycie develop into one tough big sister. We are expecting the guy’s due date to be April 9th; one week before Maycie’s 4th Birthday. The doctor says both Bailey and the baby are healthy and progressing normally.
How Would You Pack?
This plus one more bag is all we could take with us for 9 months. We were so thankful to our home church who setup and furnished a house for us to come home to. All we had to do was unpack our bags, and we were settled.
We arranged the house to make room for the chaotic packing job.
Maycie and Dylan were excited to help us pack up.
We still consider ourselves to be new missionaries even though we’ve been with New Tribes Mission for about 5 years. We had still never packed for the infamous “Home Assignment” and we were a bit overwhelmed at the thought. We needed to pack for 9 months which would include two-months of road trip, travel to the Northwestern US in winter, a new baby, and summer in California. Thankfully we didn’t have very much in the clothing department that was still in good enough shape to bother taking with us, so it made packing light a bit easier. It is too expensive to ship things home, so we decided to just bring what the airlines allowed and no more.
We went through every room in the house and just pulled out the most important things and set them inside open suitcases. The things we left behind needed to be packed in such a way that they wouldn’t mold or get eaten by pests in our absence, so we put them in another pile which we would later seal in containers with desiccant.
Then there was the issue of the house itself, our vehicles, dogs, etc. It is very likely that the house would be broken into by thieves if we just left it without a caretaker. We had to arrange someone to watch the house, cut the grass and pay the bills. We also had to sign a new rental agreement on the house to be sure it would be ours when we returned, and we needed to arrange for someone to care for and exercise the dogs regularly. After that, we arranged for a couple of people to drive our vehicles periodically while we’re gone, someone to register them, a way to get insurance updated, and a means for transferring money to those who are helping us, etc, etc, etc.Needless to say, leaving for 9 months was a daunting task and a very expensive one. Thanks to a wonderful community of missionaries and Filipino friends, we were able to make the necessary arrangements and get packed up with time to spare. Things will most certainly come up that need our attention while we’re gone, but we now have one more major “missionary” experience under our belts.
Another Pruett Baby
Many have tried but there is just no way to look cool driving a minivan. It's like a scab, picking at it just makes it worse.
That’s right. We came as a family of three when Maycie was just 4 months old and we’re returning with a 3 1/2 year old, a 1 1/2 year old and another one in the hangar due to arrive in April. We are so excited about a third Pruett to add to the clan and to be at home for the first time when one of our kids is born – Maycie was born in Arizona during our flight training and Dylan in the province in Mindanao.
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The Grand Finale
I unloaded the plane and loaded the truck for the last time this term. We plan to return next August and pick up where we've left off.
These last few months have been stressful to say the least. We’ve had a lot on our plate and had to adapt our schedule around several changes that we couldn’t have seen coming. This has meant that I have had to fly a lot closer to our departure for the States than we’d planned. In the end we were delayed enough that Brian was unable to finish Joel’s checkout so he shifted his attention to working with Garry, our chief pilot. The task was to fly with him and make sure he was current in all the airstrips so that he could take over checking Joel out on the last two airstrips.
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Flame Out, Not Burn Out
Jet engines are easily restored from a flame out with a simple resuply of fuel flow and a restart.
A few years ago I took my motorcycle on a long ride in the Arizona desert. I was nearing the end of a very tiring 100 mile ride when the engine began to sputter. No problem, I thought, I’ll just select “reserve” on the fuel tank. I reached for the reserve lever only to discover that it was already there. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to limp an engine along that is in the initial stages of fuel exhaustion, but it can be quite a challenge. I swerved all over the place, bounced up and down, rocked back and forth – anything to try to slosh just a few ounces of fuel back into the carburetor so I could continue. Even 100 yards extra means a lot when the alternative is walking the bike home in the desert sun.
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Steve Jobs is Dead. So is our iMac
I love Apple's simple language and how they make the complex seem so easy and simple. This is the symbol I was given when the iMac died instead of the normal Apple logo. Simple enough, "Don't enter. Time to move on with your life". It says so much with so little.
It was tragic to hear this week about the death of Steve Jobs. What an amazing inventor, businessman and communicator. He really made a lot of advances in the world today and many of his inventions are helping us in our ministry to work more efficiently and with less time staring at blue screens and syntax errors. One could even say he helped advance the Gospel, though he never believed it himself.
We use two Apple computers, an iMac and a MacBook. Neither are new, but both are vital parts of our ministry. We use them to communicate with supporters, write email, bookkeeping, flight scheduling, publishing safety data, presentations, inspections, research, networking, Skype, photos, videos editing, weather, etc etc… In other words, we really depend on our computers.
That is, until a couple weeks ago. I remember distinctly when it all started. After returning from a long trip to Luzon we found our iMac unable to boot up. Through the display’s backlight I could see fog and knew that our computer was in trouble in the tropics. After leaving the computer on for 24 hours in “boot up mode” it finally warmed up enough to dry out. It booted up but has never been the same. It would often crash without warning and without any discernible pattern. These crashes became more and more frequent until finally it wouldn’t boot any longer.
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It Takes a Team
Lyle Mankey and John Meerstra talking with the Dinangat people at the airstrip.
The following came from the NTMA field news on www.ntm.org. It is a great story of how we are all part of the same team:
A visit from a church team from Alaska helped the Dinangat visualize something they’d heard about.
A work team recently came from ChangePoint of Anchorage, Alaska, one of the sending churches of Eric and Casey Zimmerman, to do some construction and help in other ways at the NTM Aviation facility in Goroka. During their visit, they made a 45-minute flight to visit the Dinangat church, deep in the mountains of Papua New Guinea.
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Taking it up a Notch
It's been a real challenge to keep up with all the normal flying in addition to teaching Joel how to do it. Thankfully we're getting a little bit of a breather this week as we wait for Joel's check ride.
It feels like I’ve only just begun flying here in the Philippines, but by the time we head to the States for home assignment in November I’ll have flown almost 300 hours, nearly 1,000 landings and 600 flight legs. It doesn’t sound like much, but under these conditions and on these short flights, that is a lot of flying and loading and unloading! We’re now working with Joel and Missy Davis to hand responsibilities off so that they can run things by themselves while we’re gone. It is also important that Joel and I be able to fill in for each other when we are both working together after we return from the States.
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Rust and the Art of Vehicle Maintenance
So here I am, in a hotel room in the city still trying to change my rear brake pads. Let me explain what’s going on…
Normally changing brake pads on my truck takes me about 30-40 minutes per axle and in my past experience it’s done every 50-80K miles depending on driving style etc. etc. But the brake pads that are available locally last about 6K miles so they get changed with every tire rotation. It was getting expensive so this time I decided to try some pads from the US and see if they last longer. I ordered them last April and just got them. When I went to install them I ran into trouble that I knew would require spare parts – something I can’t get quickly (it can take months) and due to the extreme rate of brake pad consumption I can’t wait that long. This means taking it to a shop.
There is a good shop here that I have enjoyed using, but things aren’t done the same here due to a lack of resources. Basically what has happened is that the brake calipers needed to be overhauled-a very easy job in the States. In fact all you do is hand your worn out parts to the guy at the parts counter and for about $60 he hands you an overhauled one. It’s a fair trade. No such resource here.
Once I knew an overhaul was in order, I hurried to a hotel to book a room as quickly as I could because hotels in the city run at about 80% occupancy and the 20% that are vacant aren’t places you’d want to go near. I’ve learned that once things start to get complicated on a repair I need to start arranging to stay for a night or two.
Once booked in a room I rode public transportation back to the shop, approved some other repairs and hung out to make sure the work was done how I wanted. In the end the parts that arrived were the wrong ones, so it will be late tomorrow before I get to drive home on a new set of brake pads.
Our vehicle is a 1990 model Landcruiser 70 series and is as suited to this environment as any vehicle in the world is. However, I have to be realistic-it is almost 22 years old and has lived a hard life. I am tremendously thankful for it and am reminded how incredibly blessed we are in the States to have the infrastructure that we do. After all, a job that could easily be done by the end of my second cup of coffee back home has taken me since April to plan and execute!