A Heart for the Delivery of Basic Needs
Around the world a MAF flight takes off or lands every 5.5 minutes. Daily, MAF flies around 380 passengers and over 14,600kg freight (not including passenger baggage allowances) and does around 98 hours of flying per day.
Many of these flights carry basic needs for the communities we serve.
Food – South Sudan
A flight in South Sudan carried 600kg of food and supplies to Daga Post in Upper Nile State. Partner James Nyaka from Fruits Ministry who was on the flight said, “‘I am having to bring in food because the rains have failed. The team left Juba some months ago prepared with seeds and nets for fishing, but the rains have not yet come so the food hasn’t grown. The food (beans and posho) will last them for the next two months. Hopefully by that time they will have received some rain and their crops will also provide for them.’
Groceries – Arnhem Land
How do you get your weekly groceries/supplies? For some remote places in Australia – the settlement of Gutjangan on Bremer Island for example – other than a long boat ride, flying is the only way to get supplies. Bremer Island is 46km east of Nhulunbuy. Approximately 25 Yolngu live there.
School Books – Papua New Guinea
MAF facilitated two flights delivering over 50 boxes of books to Tekin, Papua New Guinea. These boxes weighed 24kg each and were full of school books – Bilum Books. Bilum Books is an organisation that provides educational resources throughout Papua New Guinea (PNG), such as students’ workbooks and teacher guides. They also facilitate workshops to ensure newly released school books get implemented well into teaching practices.
“We take the books to give to the teachers and they go off carrying a carton of books, about 20kg, back to the schools,” said Glenda Giles, one of the Bilum Books trainers. “The very next Monday they will be using those books in the classrooms.”
MAF was the only way to deliver the materials and training to places where road access is non-existent.
“Having MAF willing to fly those books to various parts of the country brings the whole thing home, because there’s no point of having a book that can’t reach the final user,” said Carol Luttah, the General Manager of CBM – Christian Books Melanesia (CBM), the distributor for Bilum Books throughout PNG.
Access to proper educational resources is difficult in the rural areas. MAF delivering these books helps to promote literacy and develop better learning in isolated places.
Vaccines
Over a period of two days, Pilot Patrick Keller from MAF Madagascar delivered:
– 400,000 vaccine doses
– to 8 different remote locations
– with a total weight of 1800 kilos
A number of different childhood vaccines were flown, including BCG (tuberculosis), Bopv rout ( poliovirus), measles, tetanus vaccine, rotavirus vaccine, dpt-hepb-hib, ipv (polio) and some others, provided by the Madagascar Ministry of Health.
Crops
The Dusin airstrip lays nestled alongside a mountain ridgeline and stretches a short and narrow 441 meters long with a 9% slope. It takes the Dusin villagers three days to walk out of the bush and into Mt. Hagen. However, when they can fly with MAF it takes approximately 20 minutes to touch down at the airfield in Mt. Hagen.
The coffee they harvest is their only source of income for many living in Dusin. Without the help of MAF aircraft, the villagers could lose the vital income that helps support their needs such as education, clothing, tools and food among many other essentials.
On this flight 2700kg of coffee was flown from Dusin to Mt Hagen, Papua New Guinea.
Exam Papers
In places like Papua New Guinea, MAF helps with basic educational needs by flying in exam papers where needed, like this flight to Simbai airstrip. The boxes include exam papers for 223 Year 10 students and will be taken to three different schools in the area.