In Depth:  Gary Clayton

Although John thought they only wanted his goods, they also wanted to take his life.

Early one morning, John was walking back from the market to his home in Habai village, in Papua New Guinea’s isolated Highlands. He was carrying three bags of flour and eight litres of oil, which he was hoping to sell so he could pay for his sons’ school fees.

‘It’s a privilege,’ say staff with the Mission Aviation Fellowship, ‘to be the sole air ambulance service for the entire population of Timor-Leste.’ The Christian aviation charity responds to multiple medical emergency flight requests every week, flying to and from Dili to save hundreds of lives.

Because her village has no roads and no electricity, pregnant Marcia Pereira de Sousa was forced to walk for four hours to receive help from a rural health clinic on the eastern side of Atauro Island.

Thanks to MAF, nurse Reena Delesae was able to get hold of a Bible.

Reena is a senior nurse at Balimo Hospital in Western Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG), where the hospital is extremely short-staffed and the nurses must carefully manage the medication available because there’s a real danger of it running out.

In the West, it’s fairly easy to see a doctor, dentist or vet. In a remote, drought-stricken area of Kenya, however, the inhabitants are not so fortunate, Gary Clayton writes.

Earlier this year, Mission Aviation Fellowship partnered with friends from Christ Is The Answer Ministries (CITAM) to fly a team of doctors, dentists, veterinarians and missionaries to Olturot in northern Kenya.

Deep in the heart of the jungle lies Nomad Mougulu High School (NMHS), one of the remotest schools on earth.

Mougulu lies in the heart of a rainforest in Papua New Guinea’s (PNG’s) Western Province. The nearest secondary school is a week’s walk away.

Deep in the heart of the jungle lies Nomad Mougulu High School (NMHS), one of the remotest schools on earth.

Mougulu lies in the heart of a rainforest in Papua New Guinea’s (PNG’s) Western Province. The nearest secondary school is a week’s walk away.

Physiotherapist Ruan Swart uses MAF aircraft every week. The flights enable him to provide physiotherapy to the people of Elcho Island, Arnhem Land, one of the remotest places on earth.

For Ruan, the stress-free, 40-minute plane ride saves hours travelling by boat and land.

The emergency phone call was made to Mission Aviation Fellowship’s Programme Safety Manager.

‘The call,’ Dom Sant said, ‘asked me to take the lead on mapping communities that were affected by the earthquake that struck Markham Valley in Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea.’

A 370-mile emergency flight saved the life of a medic’s wife in Chad, the Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF) reports.

Gary Clayton writes: In 2021, MAF flew 1,443 medevac passengers worldwide. Many of the patients flown were touched by the love of Christ and the care they received from MAF pilots. This year, thanks to MAF planes, many more life-saving medical emergency flights are taking place in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.

A few weeks ago MAF pilot Roy Rissanen flew a team of American missionaries from a remote part of Guinea – the journey representing the first operational flight of MAF’s latest African programme.

With only 5% of Guinea’s roads being paved and the country’s railway network no longer running, the severe lack of transport makes life difficult for aid and development agencies, churches and missions in isolated areas.

Facing its worst drought in 40 years, food and water in Madagascar are so costly at the moment that reports are coming in of communities eating locusts, leaves, clay and even shoe leather to survive, the Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) says.

MAF writes: UNICEF says that half a million children under the age of five will be ‘acutely malnourished’ this year, with a further 110,000 facing ‘severe malnourishment’.

Wings of Love, the newest plane to join Mission Aviation Fellowship’s life-saving fleet, has touched down in Africa.

The aircraft, a Cessna Caravan, had departed from Winnipeg, southern Canada, to begin its 6,000-mile, transatlantic journey to Angola.

A petrol tanker which crashed, overturned and exploded – unleashing a fireball killing 90 – is the latest in a series of tragedies for Haiti, after which Christian agency MAF has helped bring disaster relief.

The Mission Aviation Fellowship has been at the forefront of assisting in the wake of this most recent traumatic event – only a short while after starting to wind up its humanitarian response to an earthquake which had claimed 2,200 lives a few months earlier. When the devastating 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti’s western peninsula on 14 August 2021, causing major damage and destroying tens of thousands of homes, MAF personnel responded immediately.

A five month-old girl named Sangai, who needed urgent medical treatment for a flesh-eating condition, has been saved by a Mission Aviation Fellowship pilot in Liberia.

Little Sangai was also suffering from hydrocephalus – a build-up of fluid on the brain. The condition, if left untreated, can damage brain tissue.

On 7 July, MAF Pilot Mike Brown loaded a new Kodiak Quest 100 aircraft with food supplies and Bibles and flew to Emdoman, central Papua.

The first operational flight for MAF’s newest aircraft had taken almost three years to reach MAF’s Indonesian programme due to coronavirus restrictions.

MAF’s peace-promoting planes are helping the aviation organisation’s partners to visit some of the most war-torn regions in South Sudan.

According to the UN, the first five months of 2020 saw a 220% increase in incidents of intercommunal violence in South Sudan’s Jonglei State compared with the same period two years ago.

When Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) Pilot Nathan Fagerlie landed in the remote village of Mokndoma in Papua, Indonesia last year, he could tell something was wrong.

‘Can you help us?’ asked Tim Ingles, a missionary serving there. ‘We have a situation.’

Even though the number of flights MAF made in 2020 was reduced because of coronavirus, its planes were still able to bring hope, help and healing to 26 of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable nations.

In Kenya, where overland travel can be dangerous by day and treacherous at night, Pilot Daniel Loewen-Rudgers flew a baby boy from Dukana, on the Ethiopian border, to Kijabe Hospital, when the condition of the newborn became critical. According to Daniel: ‘It was a miracle we could fly to a good hospital like Kijabe during the pandemic.’

As an unprecedented virus disrupts the planet, MAF’s planes and people are helping to prevent the spread of coronavirus in some of the world’s poorest places.

Implementing every precaution possible to protect its personnel and the isolated areas MAF serves, the organisation has been quick to offer support wherever possible.

Every year, in the 26 countries MAF serves, pilots from the Christian aviation charity carry out hundreds of medical emergency flights for ill and injured people and women facing pregnancy complications.

In Suriname, the organisation’s experience of life-saving medevacs proved vital when MAF Country Director and Chief Pilot Andy Bijkerk had to carry out an urgent flight.

On 1 September 2019, Hurricane Dorian struck the Bahamas. The Category 5 storm, with 185mph winds and storm surges of up to 23 feet, is one of the most powerful Atlantic hurricanes to make landfall.

Regarded as the worst natural disaster in the country’s history, the storm caused widespread flooding and destruction. It killed at least 50 people and left more than 70,000 people homeless.