11 July

Hello!

Another week has come and gone already. Hard to believe that in about 2.5 weeks, I will be back home.

This week was good, with no "smoke" stories to tell, which makes the week less interesting, but better. I spent a lot of time this week doing various small jobs - it's getting to the point of our supervisor starting to pull out low-priority jobs in an attempt to find something to keep us interns busy. So I put ends on hoses and things like that for a large part of the week, just small jobs, but it was good experience. Then Thursday night one of the other interns told me "I hope you're not planning on going to market tomorrow, because we're getting picked up at 6:30 AM to go fly to Goroka in a helicopter." I was thankful I hadn't needed to go to market, although I would have skipped market even if I had needed something. So we got picked up at 6:30 for a 7:00 take-off, and took off a few minutes after 8:30, due to fog. It was an absolutely amazing flight, though. Craig, the third intern, ended up switching over and flying to Madang in the Kodiak, but Daniel Holtz and I both stuck with the plan of going to Goroka in the helicopter. He had never ridden in a helicopter before, so he got to ride up front first, but I got to ride up front coming back. Our pilot was Gavin Jones, a LeTourneau alum, so that was fun, too. Flying over the mountains here was stunning; we flew safely high, but low enough that sometimes we had to go up to clear ridges and fly over them by less than 500 ft. Seeing all of the mountains from above was breathtaking. Goroka is only about 25 minutes each way by helicopter, but I still took LOTS of pictures. This flight that we had on Friday may very well be the most fun thing I've done so far since I've gotten here.

This morning I got up and went to church on Centre again, so it was an English service. Our speaker was one of the Nationals, who has been serving as a Bible translator for many, many years. I had a hard time understanding him because of his accent, but his message was good.

Tomorrow will probably be my only day of work for this week, as our Madang trip will be Tuesday through Friday. On Tuesday we will take a Public Motor Vehicle there, will spend Wednesday and Thursday enjoying the city and the water, and will fly back in a Cessna 206 first thing Friday morning, if everything goes as planned.

Have a great week!