Botswana Journal

2009-11-12T12:56:00.000-08:00

New Things

2009-07-10T13:54:00.000-07:00

A lot has happened since I left Botswana mid-May, most of it in a whirlwhind of hellos/goodbyes, catching up, driving, camping, driving, hiking, and driving some more. From Pennsylvania to Alaska, I covered just over 6,000 miles, with stops along the way in: Goshen, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, CO Springs, Denver, Yellowstone, and Montana. From Montana it was a straight shot up through Banff and Jasper Parks in Canada to pick up the Alcan Highway a bit west of Edmonton. Four days after leaving Montana, we arrived in Anchorage, and despite the beauty and fun of the trip up, it felt good to get out of the car and to be at the final destination.

Since arriving in Anchorage, there’s been a lot going on, including, thank goodness, the acquisition of a job. Probably the most fun and challenging thing that I’ve done so far though, is to get a floatplane rating added to my pilot’s license. Yesterday I took (and passed!) my floatplane checkride and afterwards had the opportunity to take a beautiful flight up a valley south of Anchorage to a lake with a lodge on it for some delicious ice cream. So…I’m not getting bored yet. I’m also still in the process of a lot less fun things, like finding an apartment, getting a driver’s license, registering my car, etc. For the moment I’m crashed on the friend of a friend’s sofa, which is fine as far as it goes, but it will be nice to find a place and get settled in.

Check out some pictures, if you so desire, that I’ve put up on google. And of course write me emails when you get the urge.

One Last Hurrah

2009-05-19T04:31:00.001-07:00

It’s down to one last week in Botswana now, but things haven’t gotten boring yet. Friday was my last official day of work with Flying Mission, and on Saturday I left Maun and came down to Gaborone to spend my last days in the country. I had thought I was finished with my flying here, but I turned out to be very wrong. On Monday, I was in at the Flying Mission office catching up with people and finalizing some things, when a call came up for a mercy flight. My dad happened to be on the flight schedule for the day, and one thing led to another, with the end result being that I was given the opportunity to fly one last medical flight in the King Air with, of all people, my father as the captain. It ended up being a long day, with two different medical flights and a total of nearly 8 hours of flying. But I’ll trade some words in for a few pictures...

One last African sunset

Medics made us wear facemasks (for a meningitis patient).

Kgale Hill overlooking Gaborone

The Next Transition

2009-05-08T00:17:00.001-07:00

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been in Botswana for nearly two years now. For those of you who don’t know already, my time here is quickly drawing to a close. My last day of work with Flying Mission is the 15th of May and I will be flying home to Pennsylvania a week after that. It’s hard to believe that in a few short weeks I will be leaving this part of my life behind and moving on. For me, it’s as big a transition as finishing college to come to Botswana was, and I’m approaching it with a similar mix of sadness, trepidation, and excitement for what’s to come. So what is to come? Well, for the immediate future, I will be spending a few weeks visiting friends and family while travelling across the country, with the final destination of Alaska. There I will join the growing ranks of job-seekers and hope to find some sort of piloting job. Throughout this next period, I will also be exploring options for further education and hope to go back to school at some point in the next 3 years. Those are my plans in just about full detail…which is to say, I haven’t planned in very much detail…but I trust that the rest will fall into place. This entry isn’t meant to be my last blog from Botswana, but just to let folks know a bit of what is going on in the next few months. Thanks for all your support, and I look forward to seeing some of you very soon!

High Water

2009-04-21T10:02:00.000-07:00

The Chobe river flooding near Kasane

Floods in the Sands

2009-04-07T11:46:00.000-07:00

It goes without saying that it has been far too long since I have written anything here. I have no excuse other than lack of motivation…I’ve started writing about three different posts about Zimbabwe, which has been weighing on my mind a lot recently, but never managed to do the subject justice or work up the patience to finish. So for now I will write about something completely different.

Gratuitous picture of me in my plane (photo credit: J. Ewert)

Last week, we received a call from the clinic in Seronga, a village at the top of the delta where the Okavango River begins to fan out. They had a patient that urgently needed to be transferred to the hospital in the nearby village of Gumare. The flight from Seronga to Gumare is only 15 minutes, but the only alternatives are a 4-hour boat ride or a grueling, bumpy gravel road to the nearest ferry crossing (1.5 hours) followed by a 2 hour paved road trip. On average, we move about 2 patients a month along this route.

Seronga-Gumare route in red (practicing my photoshop skills)

I headed for Seronga as quickly as I could, and was soon kicking myself for not bringing my camera. The upper regions of the delta are always the most beautiful because they always have more water than the rest, but this time it was spectacular. The water at the top of the delta was higher than I have ever seen it, and areas that have clearly not had water for a long time were completely flooded. Every rainy season, heavy rains in Angola funnel into several large river systems, one of which is the Okavango that feeds the Okavango Delta. When the water from these rains (the yearly “flood”) makes its way down to Botswana about 3-4 months later, the delta fills up once again and provides the moisture that sustains huge amounts of plants and wildlife. By all accounts, this is an amazing year for water in the delta. The rains over the delta itself coupled with heavy rains in Angola have brought water levels that haven’t been seen here since 1963, and the main part of the flood hasn’t even arrived yet! While this is causing some problems for a few villages (if you’re fast you might catch the article about it in the Ngami Times), for the most part it is a huge boon for wildlife in the area. This flood should rejuvenate groundwater levels after many dry years as well as provide water much further downstream to areas that have been dry for a long time (here is an informative article for anybody interested).

Flying to Seronga and Gumare gave me a chance to see this record flood firsthand and enjoy the beautiful scenery. Just for fun, I’ll link to a pretty picture of the delta from space and a cute article about the “Babes of Botswana.” Enjoy, and keep well.

Home 2

2009-02-10T21:31:00.000-08:00

It’s the little things that make me feel like I’m at home, the familiar details that catch my attention again and make me feel comfortable in a place. In the last decade I have called many different places home, and each time I am back in one of those places there are myriad little things that tug at my heart and connect me to the memories that are stored up there. Yesterday evening it was the southern cross, hanging low over the trees in my yard, that stopped me in my tracks as I carried my suitcase into my house. I’m not usually overly sentimental, but my eyes nearly misted over as I watched it for a few long seconds…an old friend welcoming me home. Later, after getting all my bags unloaded and settling in a bit, I went out and lay on the hood of the car for a while, just relaxing in the familiar feel and sounds of night-time Maun: the croaking of hundreds of frogs down by the river, the ceaseless chirping and squeaking of insects, an occasional owl hoot, the sky pricked with innumerable stars piercing through even the light of a full moon. The cool night air, smelling clean and distinctly wild, untouched, broken with the odd sound of civilization: dogs, cars, faint strains of music. I will miss this little corner of Africa, this frontier town on the edge of beautiful, rugged, wilderness. I will miss the strange group of people that gather from all corners of the world in this safari center. But for now, I’m here, back in a place that has started to feel strangely like home. And I’ll enjoy it while I can.

Home

2009-02-02T04:50:00.000-08:00

Before December, I had been away from the states for over 18 months. While I know that isn't as long as many long-term missionaries or international students remain away from home, it felt like a pretty long time for me. It's not the places that I missed nearly as much as the people. So I was very excited to have the opportunity in December to return to the U.S. and reconnect with many of my friends and family. While in the states I traveled to Goshen, Philadelphia, Souderton, and Washington D.C. to visit friends and of course spent quite a bit of time with family at home. It was a wonderfully refreshing trip and a great time of renewing relationships and being with people that I love deeply. It was in many ways difficult to leave those things behind once again to come back to Botswana (although I definitely was feeling a flying itch that needed some scratching and was excited to get back to work here with Flying Mission).

On the way back from my vacation in the states, I stopped in Europe to spend a week with some former Flying Mission friends in London and Switzerland. I flew into London and spent a long and hurried day seeing the sights there before flying with two friends down to Zurich, Switzerland. In Zurich, we met with two other friends and drove down into a small town in the Alps, where we stayed at wonderful little cabin right at the bottom of a ski slope (it’s nice to have friends with connections!). There we enjoyed an amazing weekend of downhill skiing, sledding, cross-country skiing, snowboarding, and fantastic company (I’ve posted some pictures from this Swiss weekend on my google photos). I then flew back to London and very reluctantly boarded the plane to Johannesburg, eventually making my way back to Botswana. So I’ve now been back in Botswana for several day…almost completely re-adjusted to the heat, and back in the pilot’s seat loving my job.

Enroute

2008-12-07T08:05:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately I have been lacking lately in the blog-writing sphere of things, and I don't have much time right now to do it justice. I'm posting this from the Johannesburg Int'l Airport, where I'm waiting to board the flight that will take me back to the states for the holidays (and taking advantage of the (sadly not free) wireless internet access). This is the first time I'm going home since I've been here in Botswana, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing family and friends again. I will be in the States for 4 (hectic) weeks and then will be spending one week in Europe with some former Flying Mission short-termers before coming back to Botswana to finish my term. Alright, time to head. Internet time is running out.

All things Zambian

2008-11-15T10:16:00.000-08:00

I went to Zambia expecting to be staying for 2 or 3 weeks, but it ended up taking nearly twice as long as I expected. I’m still in Lusaka (the Zambian capital) but will most likely be returning to Maun in two days time. The Zambia survey contract that I wrote about was done for ZAWA (Zambian Wildlife Authority). The main purpose of the survey is to count elephants, but while they’re at it, they’re counting anything that they see. It was an ambitious undertaking, with the intent of doing a comprehensive survey of the entire country’s National Parks and Game Management Areas in three weeks time. The time expectation didn’t end up being at all realistic, but for the amount of planning that had to go into this project in a very short time period, we got quite a bit done. It was exhausting for all involved, and to give you a taste, here’s a typical day’s schedule.

430 am: Wonder how it could be morning already, roll out of bed, rub the eyes, splash some water on the face and wolf down some cornflakes.

5 am: Meet with the ZAWA teams, climb in the pickup bed and ride to the airport squinting into the sunrise and the cool morning air.

530 am: Do a thorough preflight of the airplane, pile the crew into their seats, and take off into the prevailing easterly winds with a blinding sun in the face and hope nothing is crossing the runway at the time. Head for the morning survey area, sometimes up to 45 min flight from the base airport. Follow little lines on the GPS for 4 hours straight while trying to maintain 300 feet above the ground and 85 knots airspeed, avoiding mountains and hills, and trying to keep the ornery airplane engine from overheating. Look for wildlife in any spare time.

10 am: Return from the survey saddle-sore and with legs aching from being in the same position all morning. Try to avoid colliding with any of the many people or vehicles crossing the runway. Hand-pump fuel into the airplane in preparation for the afternoon flight under the close watch of crowds of locals who flock to see what all the action is about.

1130 am: Get to the hotel/guesthouse, grab a quick bite for lunch and crash in the room for as long as possible. Get up in time to enter GPS waypoints for the afternoon surveys, a process that might take as long as an hour.

2 pm: Meet again for the afternoon flight and truck back out to the airport.

230 pm: Quick check of the airplane and we’re off again, this time battling high temperatures and reduced aircraft performance in the afternoon, barely clearing the trees at the end of some of the shorter strips. Weigh the advantages of taking off uphill and into the wind or vice versa. Survey for 3 hours, dodging rain showers and thunderstorms. Time the return to the airport to allow for a flight to another airstrip before dark if the home airport is under a storm.

530 pm: Back home again and pump fuel for the morning flight. Secure the airplanes and leave them in the care of the ZAWA sentry, armed with a rickety rifle of some sort.

630 pm: Get back, talk over the plans for the next day, and start entering more GPS waypoints for the morning flight. Eat a meal scraped together by Tracy, the wife of one of the pilots, from canned food and bread and whatever else can be found in the village (most of the places we stayed served traditional food, which we stomached for a while, but after a while pretty much anything is better than fried village chicken and mealie-meal. Not bad for a bit, but the menu is very repetitious and greasy.)

830 pm: If state of fatigue allows it, have a quick shower. Tuck in the mosquito net and roll into bed, aware that it all starts over again in less than 8 hours.

After almost 4 weeks of this schedule, with just a few days off scattered in there, I’m pretty much destroyed. It’s been a lot of fun and a great experience, but I’m very ready to be heading back to my house in Maun and to the flying there. I’ve posted some pictures from the last few weeks on my picasaweb page

Wildlife in the Northern Wilds

2008-10-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Flying Mission Zambia has won a contract to count wildlife across the country. I’m not very sure of the details, but apparently they need more planes and pilots than they’ve got at this point, so FMS in Botswana is loaning me and my plane to Zambia for the next few weeks. The airplane I’ll be flying is in the shop getting a radar altimeter fitted (an altimeter that directly measures the aircraft’s height above ground by radar rather than by air pressure, like most altimeters) and as soon as it comes out I’ll be flying up to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. There I meet some people who will jump in the plane before we head off for a 3-hour flight to Mfuwe to get the survey equipment fitted and calibrated. After that, it’s another 2 hours flying to the place where we will start surveying. There are three different locations I’ll be surveying, and each will take around 5-6 days, so I could be in Zambia for up to three weeks doing this flying. I’m excited for the opportunity to do some flying in a new country and to do this totally different kind of flying. It will be a new challenge for sure, as I’ve never done survey flying before. FM Zambia is arranging accommodation and food for me, but I have no idea what sort of internet access I will have, if at all. So until then, hang loose. Hopefully I’ll come back with some pictures and some stories to boot.

Random Pictures

2008-10-18T11:56:00.000-07:00

The first raindrops of the year on my car's roof. Pretty lame picture, you might say. I guess. But maybe after my last week's post you might understand why I'm so excited about a few raindrops. We just caught the edge and a few drops out of what looked like a pretty big storm off to the south. This car roof hasn't seen raindrops in about 8 months.

2008-10-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

Sunrise in front of my tent at Camp Kalahari, near Jack's Camp.

2008-10-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

Dragonfly at Xugana airstrip in the delta.

Dusty Summer Days

2008-10-16T02:24:00.000-07:00

It’s a brutal season here in Botswana. Summer has arrived with a vengeance and the cooling rains are as of yet nowhere in sight. By this time last year, it had been raining for a month already, but then last year was an exceptional rain year. The days are bearable as long as you don’t stand in the sun for longer than a few minutes at a time and don’t do anything too strenuous, but the nights can be miserable. Taking a cold shower just before bed and then lying right underneath my ceiling fan is just enough to let me fall asleep.
It’s also the height of vomit season for the passengers in the delta. The combination of sweltering heat, massive updrafts, downdrafts and turbulence caused by the sun beating on the earth’s surface, and strong winds is a volatile mix, and countless poor tourists lose their lunches to sick sacs. “The flight was good, but very emotional,” “I would be lying if I said I was a bit terrified – I was completely terrified,” and “I’ve never flown in a golf cart with wings before” were all comments from some of my passengers in the last few weeks. They don’t all appreciate the fun that a few bumps can bring.
Maun is a dusty town to start with, but the extreme dryness and the high winds of the season make it at times almost unbearably dusty. By about 10am I already feel like I’m coated in a thick layer of caked-on sweat and dust. I’ve given up on washing much of anything (car, etc.) because within a day of washing all exposed surfaces will be once again covered in a thick layer of fine white dust. While I was driving in to the airport the other day, a stretch of the road a few kilometers long was enveloped in a dust storm so thick that I turned my lights on and was afraid of coming up on someone too quickly from behind. It was like driving in a thick fog.
So it’s a hard time of year, but despite all that, it has it’s perks. Many trees are budding and speckling the landscape with patches of green in preparation for the rains. For a month or so now, various flowers have been blooming and turning gardens and roadsides flush with beautiful colors. And, while it’s a pretty brutal time of year, the rains are right around the corner and everybody is looking forward to their arrival. It can’t come soon enough for me.

Gear Incident at Maun

2008-09-29T02:36:00.000-07:00

I mentioned that there had been an incident in the same type of plane that I was flying a week or so before my own landing gear problems. I've found the story buried in a few places, most of them non-english websites. The local newspaper, The Ngami Times, was the only english one I found...unfortunately their website is a bit of a mess. If you go here, though, you should be able to read the story. Or you can go here and scroll down to find the story and some sharper pictures. The headline was "LEATHERMAN SAVES PILOTS."

Maun Medical

2008-09-24T06:19:00.000-07:00

It has been a long time since I’ve done much night flying because pretty much all of the Maun flying is daytime VFR stuff, so it was a bit unusual for me to find myself winging across the country in the dark last week. Both of our King Airs in Gaborone were down for maintenance (one for a scheduled inspection and the other with overheating engine troubles) and two hospitals called Flying Mission with patients for medical flights on the same day. Since the only other option available in Botswana or South Africa was a prohibitively expensive Hawker jet, Mark called me up in Maun and asked if I could do the flights in the Cessna 210 that I had flown down from Zambia just a few days before. The call from Mark came in the early afternoon and the two flights would be a total of over 6 hours of flying so I found myself doing the last two legs of the day at night.
I was reminded again how much I enjoy night flying. There are few things more peaceful and settling to me than cruising in glass-smooth, cool night air under the bright shine of a full moon. The radio is quiet, with only the occasional overnight flight from Johannesburg to Europe breaking the silence on the airwaves. Even in the bright moonlight, a few of the brighter stars manage to push their way through. The luminescent white expanse of the Makgadikgadi Salt Pans dominates the landscape for almost a third of the 1.5 hour trip home to Maun from Francistown. The feeling of solitude is strengthened by the knowledge that I am passing over a vast expanse of land virtually devoid of human habitation, save for the odd scattered cattle post (and not even that over the massive salt pans)…and this isolation feeds the only distraction from my sense of peace: the knowledge that I’m counting on one (fallible) piece of engineering to keep me aloft above this dry, desolate expanse. At night, my normal scan of the engine instruments becomes almost obsessive and borders on the paranoid. I reassure myself (half-successfully) by remembering that I know this stretch of desert intimately (I fly directly over Jack’s Camp, so the last half of the route is the same route that I fly from Maun to Jack’s an average of at least once a day). I know exactly where the nearest road is (there is only one paved road in the area after all), where the nearest groups of people are located, where the suitable landing strips are, where the trees start to take over the grassland and make any emergency landings more painful…and on top of that, the full moon would enable me to easily find and land on any of the airstrips on the route. So even my paranoia doesn’t detract too much from the experience.
The beauty and serenity of the flight was kept intact up until the very last minutes, when I innocently selected the gear down and patiently waited for the landing gear to extend and lock in the down position. And waited. And waited. And finally, after some long seconds, grudgingly came to the uncomfortable conclusion that the hydraulic pump meant to pump down the gear was not pumping. This conclusion was made even more uncomfortable by the memory of an incident that had occurred with this same type of airplane at Maun just a few days ago, in which the landing gear didn’t come down (it was an amazing story, actually, which you can read about here and here and here). I told the tower about my problem and asked to circle to the east of the field while I tried to take care of the problem. Cycling the gear selector did nothing, and all circuit breakers were in, so I pumped the gear down using the manual hand pump provided for exactly this situation, and the gear came down just fine. I then made a normal landing and headed for home, relieved that nothing more complicated came of the incident and relieved to finally be heading for bed (by this time it was 9:59 pm…I landed just before the airport closing time of 10). A long, but worthwhile, day. It feels good to be available to help out on flights like those, providing valuable access to needed medical care and even helping to save lives sometimes.

Friends of all kinds

2008-08-22T00:17:00.000-07:00

In the last few weeks, I’ve enjoyed a significant infusion of new friends in my life. So, without further ado:

2008-08-22T00:08:00.000-07:00

Koko (or the phonetically-equivalent “Cocoa” for the English-inclined) joined me on my flight from Gaborone back to Maun after my week of doing maintenance on the airplane in South Africa, and is a now a permanent resident of my Maun house. Debbie found her abandoned along the roadside near the female short-termers house in Gaborone, and since Nicola and Debbie are both leaving in a few weeks they needed to find a home for her. She now enjoys a reign of terror in my house, where she eats ravenously and indiscriminately, fearlessly climbs any and all panted legs, and will stalk and attack any moving object with abandon. She also does her best to chew off any proffered fingers.

2008-08-22T00:05:00.000-07:00

Christoph is a much more transient visitor. Hailing from Germany, he spent a year working with Flying Mission as a short-termer about 3 years ago, and is just coming back to spend a few months here helping out where he can. He has been working with Baptist missionaries here in Maun, and I have greatly enjoyed spending time with Christoph and getting to know him. One of the highlights: Christoph found a neighbor of his that has a boat and convinced him to let us rent it for the day. The catch…it didn’t come with a motor. So we spent the day learning how to pole up and down the river, with varying degrees of success. It was hard work and lots of fun, but I unfortunately forgot to take my camera along.

2008-08-22T00:03:00.000-07:00

The new Flying Mission couple has also arrived in Maun, as mentioned before. Here Julie enjoys a nap with Koko in one of her quieter moments. The Browns are staying with me in my house until about the second week of September, when they plan on moving into a house of their own. They’ve already signed the lease and it looks like things are falling into place for that arrangement. They are a very warm-hearted couple and it has been a lot of fun living with them and getting to know them in the last week or two.

2008-08-21T23:59:00.000-07:00

The Maun flight department in its entirety. Unfortunately, right now Colin isn’t able to do any flying on his own because our only aircraft at the moment is registered in South Africa and Colin only has his Botswana license. Flying Mission is working on getting a Bots-registered airplane down from our department in Zambia for him to fly, so hopefully that will all come together in the next weeks. It will be a great help to have Colin flying as well and giving me a bit of a break from time to time. I’m looking forward to working here more as a team rather than all on my own, so it’s exciting to finally have the Browns with me.

2008-08-21T23:56:00.000-07:00

Finally (lest this post get too long for you to suffer through), our gardener brought his family along one evening last week and we invited them in for dinner. Lesh, his wife Gaone, and their child Warona, came in and enjoyed some food and conversation before heading back home for the night. During the day, Lesh is a maintenance worker at Love Botswana, a large church/school complex just down the road from us.

Alright, that’s it for the new friends of the moment. More to come later.

2008-08-11T06:10:00.000-07:00

First of all, I must apologize for my abysmal blogging record of late. It’s been partly due to being very busy, partly due to laziness, and largely influenced by the lack of new and different things that have been happening of late.

At the moment I’m coming to the end of a long weekend spent in South Africa at Mercy Air once again, having an inspection done on the airplane. The goal was to have the inspection finished within two days, but unfortunately we fell just a few hours short of that goal on Saturday evening meaning that we had to wait until today (Monday) to finish up the last bits of work. It was okay for me though, because I was very happy to have Sunday off after a long week of flying and then working on the airplane. The last month’s schedule has been for the most part a continuous loop of 7 days of flying with one day off in between, which gets pretty tiring after a while. In that month, I’ve flown about 95 hours, which is just short of the maximum of 100 hours per month allowable by law in Botswana. So needless to say I’ve been pretty busy.

The other big news is that a new Flying Mission couple has moved up to Maun to join me. Colin and Julie Brown have lived in Alaska (where Colin had his own flying business and Julie was an elementary teacher) for the past 30 years and are making a major transition I their lives by coming to Botswana. They were staying with me in my house for a few days before I left to come down here, and they will be living with me until they find a place of their own to settle in to. More about them later, but now I need to run along and help finish up the work on the airplane. And then back to the grind.

Sunrises and things

2008-07-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

It’s been business as usual in Maun for the last week or so. The aircraft finally got out of the maintenance and paperwork muddle that it had been mired in down south, and last Thursday I airlined down to Johannesburg to pick it up and bring it back to Maun. Since then, we’ve been quite busy and I think I’ve had more than my share of early morning flights. The other day I had to leave before sunrise to pick up some passengers at a small airstrip near Maun (the directors of Flying Mission and some of their family, incidentally) and found myself grumpily flying along, after rebelling against my alarm clock a bit too long and then rushing through breakfast to leave in time for the flight. It was a beautiful morning, though, (as is every winter morning here, without fail) and as I watched the sun peak up over the green waterways of the delta from 500 ft I couldn’t stop a wide grin from spreading across my face and sticking there. And I was once again reminded how lucky I am to be in this place. But I know that it’s not just this place – you can find moments of beauty like that one wherever you are, provided you look for them. I often find myself forgetting that and becoming so used to a place that I don’t remember to look for beauty or newness anymore, and that’s a trap that I want to keep myself from falling into. Life is so much richer if you take time to appreciate it.

Windhoek in Review

2008-07-08T00:53:00.000-07:00

The last week has been fantastic. As I said in my last post, I got to do a charter trip for my dad’s company. So I flew his passengers on our Flying Mission King Air into and out of a camp in Namibia and one in Botswana, with him riding along as copilot on those trips. Some highlights from the week:

Scrambling to get everything ready for dad’s arrival because of a last-minute change of their arrival airport in Windhoek
Flying over the immense stretch of sand dunes in the Sossousvlei area of Namibia, near the camp to which I flew the passengers
Extremely hurried day road trip from Windhoek to the sand dunes
Being able to tell my dad what to do because he was the copilot
Riding jumpseat in the Gulfstream V my dad flies on a 10-min repositioning flight
Two-day trip to Moremi National Park with dad and another pilot from his company
Seeing hundreds of vultures and a massive male lion feasting on a kudu kill

The worst part of the week was undoubtedly watching the last few minutes of the European Cup Soccer final with increasing despair as my team (Germany) lost.

Now that the week is over, however, it’s soon back to business as usual in Maun. For the moment, I’m in Gaborone waiting for our Maun airplane to finish an inspection in South Africa. I don’t really have any idea how long I will be here…probably anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. I’m not complaining, though, because being here gives me a chance to spend some more time with my friends here (some of whom are leaving very soon) and also may give me a chance to do some more King Air flying. I’ll enjoy it while I’m here, anyway.

Windhoek

2008-06-27T23:43:00.000-07:00

In a few short hours, I'm off to Windhoek, the capital city of Namibia. If all goes well, once I get to Windhoek, I'll see my father once again (for the fourth time in the year that I'm here!). This time, though, it's business for both of us. My dad is a corporate pilot in the US, and it just so happens that he's bringing some passengers over to Southern Africa, where they'll stay at safari camps in Namibia and Botswana. However, since the aircraft that he flies is too large to go into the dirt airstrips that service the camps, he arranged for his company to contract with Flying Mission to take his passengers from the main airports to the camps. So I will fly up to Namibia, meet him and his passengers, and fly them from Windhoek to their camp where we will drop them for a few nights. I'll then take the passengers from the camp back to Windhoek, where they'll jump on my dad's plane and fly to Maun. I'll then meet them in Maun and fly them from Maun to a camp in the delta for a few nights and afterwards pick them up again. It's pretty exciting to be able to do this flight, not least because dad will be riding along as a second pilot on the flights in Namibia. So it will be the first time that I'll be captain with my dad as my first officer! Nice, huh? The trip will be in the King Air, which is also fun and will be a nice change from the small Cessna that I have been flying for the last few months in Maun. After this trip though (which ends on July 4th) it will be back to business as usual in Maun. I'm hoping that I'll soon have internet at my house there and will be able to update this site more regularly, although it has been a terribly long and somewhat painful process trying to get that set up. We shall see what time brings.

A Word on the Delta

2008-06-16T05:56:00.000-07:00

While the average rainfall of Botswana is generally higher than most definitions of a “desert” require, most of the country is extremely arid and desert-like. This is partially due to the irregularity of the rainfall and to extremely high evaporation rates (almost 6 feet over the course of a year from standing water!). Nowhere in Botswana does annual rainfall exceed the rate of evaporation, so bodies of water are extremely rare and the only permanent ones (other than man-made reservoirs) are the Chobe river along the northern border and the Okavango Delta in the northwest. This makes the delta an amazing and unique area. It is the world’s largest inland delta, dumping the waters collected by the Okavango River in Angola into the deep, dry sands of the Kalahari region and creating a massive green oasis of winding channels and lagoons in the midst of an extremely harsh, arid environment. This contrast is very striking, and can be seen quite starkly in pictures from space. As a permanent source of water, the delta sustains huge amounts of wildlife and birdlife and is one of the jewels of Africa.

At regular intervals as I fly around this area of the country, I am struck with awe at the beauty and diversity of the life and environment around me. And I’m deeply appreciative that I get to experience this place in such an intimate way. In any one flight over the delta, I invariably see elephants (often in large herds), lechwe (reddish antelope that are well-adapted to life in the water), zebra, and giraffe, with the occasional massive herd of buffalo. The birdlife is equally diverse and beautiful (although also slightly more threatening to the safety of flight). This area of the country is one best places in Africa (and probably in the world) to see such an amazing diversity of wildlife and habitat in the midst of vast areas of (relatively) unspoiled wilderness. I count myself blessed to be here.

2008-06-16T05:55:00.000-07:00

The Okavango Delta from space (the fan-shaped area just left of center).

2008-06-16T05:54:00.000-07:00

The Great Outdoors

2008-06-03T09:59:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I’ve enjoyed most about being in Maun has been the amount of time I’ve been able to spend outdoors. And not just outdoors anywhere, but in some of the most beautiful, wildlife-rich, well-preserved areas of wilderness left on this world. Granted, most of my experiences of those areas are quick in-and-out ones, with the rest of it being from the air above, but it’s still an amazing privilege. The exception to this is my stays at Jack’s Camp. Since we do a lot of flights for Jack’s Camp, it often makes sense to stay overnight when the schedule is busy rather than having an empty evening leg to Maun and another one back in the morning. So I’ve spent, on average, at least one night a week there over the last two months. Jack’s Camp is in the center of the country on the edge of the Makgadigkadi Salt Pans, which are the massive remains of what was once a huge inland lake (it’s hard to believe that such a dry area once contained so much water). This area is part of a larger area known as the Kalahari, which, while not a desert by all definitions of desert, is a very arid area and has all the appearance of a desert. The nearest village is a two-hour drive on rough 4x4 roads, and after that you’ve got to drive another few hours on tar roads to get to a village with anything other than very basic supplies. I’ve very much enjoyed my stays at Jack’s for the opportunity to get outdoors and spend some time in the bush. Some of the highlights:

Massive herds of zebra, congregating around some of the few remaining water holes
Seeing a habituated meerkat colony up close
Amazing night skies that you can hardly find anywhere in the states anymore
Encounters with the diminutive gennet cats that run through the camp at night
Reading through some of the guide training materials and satisfying my dork biology self
Going for a morning run around the pan at the edge of camp
The evening sun that brings out beautiful, vibrant colors in the grasslands around the camp
Experiencing two nights in the guest side of camp (normally a $1,000/night experience, scot-free)

Even my experience in the village of Maun is much more out-of-doors than my life in Gaborone was. A two-minute walk from my front door brings me to the banks of the river that flows through Maun (well, right now it’s doing a lot more sitting than flowing, but it’s soon going to be swelled by the flood waters arriving in their annual cycle from the rains that fell earlier in the year in Angola). I’ve been trying to go for a short run most mornings, and it’s wonderful to be able to do that on a path along the river rather than on the city streets of Gabs.

2008-06-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

The "pilot tent" where I spend most of my nights at Jack's. It's got it's own little shower and bathroom out the back and newly installed DC lights so I can read after the generator goes out at night.

2008-06-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

A palm tree island on the vast grasslands surrounding Jack's Camp.

2008-06-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

The airplane on the ground at Deception Valley airstrip, on the edge of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. Waiting for passengers.

2008-06-03T09:50:00.000-07:00

The river behind my house.

Photo highlights from the last weeks/months

2008-05-23T05:24:00.000-07:00

Some of the habituated meerkats at a colony near Jack's Camp. They're standing at attention next to their burrow watching a snake eagle hovering far away.

2008-05-23T05:20:00.000-07:00

Our gimpy plane sitting in South Africa waiting for a nose gear fork.

2008-05-23T05:15:00.000-07:00

The view from the front of one of the guest tents at Jack's Camp. I was lucky enough to get a guest tent for two nights because the staff side was full.

2008-05-23T05:12:00.000-07:00

A big herd of zebra congregate at one of the last pans around Jack's Camp left with water in it. There have been some amazing herds of these animals, who will soon be migrating in their masses towards the Boteti River as the dry season gets into full swing.

Day in the Life: Maun

2008-05-19T00:20:00.000-07:00

I was taking three passengers to Xaxanaka, an airstrip on the northern edge of Moremi National Park in the Okavango Delta, and was to pick up four from there to take to Jack’s Camp. I had already gotten a late start because of a mix-up with the flight plan, so was trying to make up some time (or at least keep from getting later). There were three of us approaching the airstrip around the same time, so as we got close I was busy talking on the radio and trying to see the other airplanes so we could sequence ourselves to come in for landing. While all that was going on, an airplane was trying to depart the strip but had to wait for vehicles to clear some elephants off the runway. When they finally had it cleared, he started his takeoff run only to have another elephant step out in front of him determined to cross the runway, and the pilot had to abort the takeoff, turn around, and taxi the whole way back for another go. This made the three of us trying to land have to circle and wait for him to get off. Finally, the airplane on the ground managed to take off, and I ended up number three to land behind the other aircraft. They both landed uneventfully, but as I was coming in on short final behind the second plane, a big herd of impala scampered out right in front of me. I had no choice but to add power and go around for another try, buzzing low over the impala to scare them off the runway. Finally on the next attempt I was able to land, by this time probably a good 30 minutes behind schedule. From there, all went normally and I was able to pick up my next passengers and hurry away to Jack’s Camp.

So that’s a day in the Maun life. There definitely hasn’t been a shortage of excitement since I came up here, between the airplane’s brand-new alternator dying on me twice in a week, taking passengers to the wrong airstrip because someone messed up their itinerary (meaning rushing them to the right place and being late the rest of the day), doing last-minute flights for one of the other charter companies here, racing against sunset to get passengers delayed by Air Botswana to an unlit airport before dark, etc. Luckily this week has slowed down a bit…most days I only have one flight, and no nasty surprises have popped up as yet. And that’s good, because too many weeks like the last two might have had me booking an early ticket home :)

craziness

2008-05-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

An update is long due, but for now I don't really have the time to do it. This week has been quite crazy and I'm about ready for a break. Luckily, that's just what i'm getting at the end of the week...my parents are here to visit and we're going to have a long weekend to go on a bit of a trip. The plan is to spend a few days in Moremi National Park camping, which would be a wonderful and much-needed break from the crazy schedule I've been keeping. Hopefully after that things will slow down a bit and I may even have regular internet access...so if those two things happen, well, I'll let you know a bit of what I've been doing. Until then...keep well!

Home

2008-04-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

You wouldn’t think it would feel so good to be “home” when you’ve only lived there for a bit more than a week, but right now it feels pretty nice. When I left Maun 2 ½ weeks ago, I expected to be back in less than a week, but it was not to be. Since I left, I’ve been living out of my backpack and moving around quite a bit. The last few days in particular have been pretty taxing and quite busy, starting Saturday with the first of my flights after the airplane’s inspection in South Africa. I started out with a bang, shuttling people mostly between Jack’s Camp and Maun all day from 9am to 5pm without a break, and ended the day up in Jack’s Camp. I stayed the night in Jack’s Camp expecting to transfer some passengers to another camp in the delta come morning. Shortly before I was due to leave with the passengers, I got a call from Mark Spicer telling me that there was a patient in Kasane who urgently needed transport to Francistown for emergency surgery after a bad car accident (the patient was not a citizen so couldn’t be transferred under our contract with the Ministry of Health, meaning that Flying Mission would very likely not see any payment for the flight). After considering our options and figuring out how to juggle around the passengers I was supposed to be flying out, we elected to put the passengers on a later flight out of Jack’s while I started on my way to Kasane to pick up the patient (it was a bit of a hassle for the passengers, who were very gracious in shifting their schedules so we could take the patient). I arrived in Kasane around midday and met the patient, an Indian woman, at the airport. After shuffling around and removing some seats, we were able to fit the stretcher in one side of the 207 while the two nurses accompanying the patient sat beside her. Two hours later we had her on the ground in Francistown, where she was whisked away in an ambulance to the operating theater. Finally, on the last of three two-hour legs, I returned by myself to Maun and came back to my house for the first time in nearly three weeks. So here I am at last, once again with a bed and a kitchen and a desk to call my own. Life is good.

Stranded...

2008-04-23T00:20:00.000-07:00

So as I said last time, I brought the Cessna 207 that I've been flying in Maun down to South Africa to have an inspection done on it, fully expecting that the inspection would take, at the very longest, a week. Shoulda known better. The inspection itself was finished by Wednesday (in three days, that is), but on Wednesday morning, as we were putting the plane back together and finishing up a few little details that needed attention, one of the mechanics here found a crack in the nosewheel fork. The fork is the part that comes down over top of the wheel on both sides and holds the axle, much like a bicycle fork. Closer inspection revealed that the crack was pretty serious and extended through one of the bolt holes. Since then it's been sort of a comedy of errors in getting the replacement part here...to make a long story short, the couriers who were to bring the part messed up at least 3 different times and when the part finally arrived days later, it was the wrong part. So currently we're scrambling to see if one part that a shop in a nearby town has is the right one, which is our last chance to get the part from somewhere in South Africa. If that doesn't work out, we're back to square one and have to order the part from the US, and that would take at least 10 days to get here and be horridly expensive. The long and short of it is that I've been sitting at Mercy Air in South Africa (granted, not the worst place in the world to be stuck...I've met some really neat people here) for much longer than I would wish. But hey, you just gotta roll with the punches. One of these days I'll actually make it back to Maun and start being a real pilot instead of sitting on my rear for weeks on end.

Update to come....

2008-04-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

Life has been a bit crazy for the last few weeks. I moved to Maun (where I don't yet have regular internet access) and got settled in there, doing orientation and such with Tim for a while. Then last week I stayed two nights at Jacks Camp (which is the camp we're doing most of our flying for from Maun), which is in the bush without cell phone or internet connections (at least no internet that was available to me). Right after that, I flew the airplane down to Gabs and will be flying it on to South Africa tomorrow, where it will have an inspection done on it that will probably take most of the week. After which I make the long flight back to Maun. So I'm sort of all over the place these days and haven't had much time or opportunity to sit down and write anything for the blog. All of that to say, once i get settled again, more updates will be forthcoming. For now, though, things are a bit scattered. To hold you over, though, I put up a few more pictures from our trip last month.

2008-04-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

Going through one of those Moremi puddles that somehow looks way less impressive from this angle.

2008-04-13T08:39:00.000-07:00

The Landy after a few hours of schlepping through door-deep mud puddles in Moremi.

If you must...

2008-04-08T01:50:00.000-07:00

I thought you might enjoy this sign. Stefan came across it while on the way to Kgale Hill, the most prominent Gaborone landmark just southwest of the city. I like the resignation that the sign implies…people are going to litter, so they might as well do it in a convenient place for clean-up. There were of course a few pieces of trash right under the sign, thankfully on the right side of the fence. Littering is a real problem here, and I guess it would probably be a lot worse if the population was higher than it is. I saw a billboard the other day saying something to the effect of “a proud nation doesn’t litter to provide job security,” although I don’t remember the exact wording. Such efforts haven’t deterred everybody though. On my way to Maun, I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker who was walking (under a rather oppressive sun) towards the next village about 5 km down the road. I offered him the last of the crackers that I had been snacking on along the way, which he gladly accepted. He finished off the last two and casually chucked the plastic wrapper out the window. I seriously considered slamming the car to a halt, lecturing him on the evils of dirtying up his beautiful country, and going back to find the trash but quickly thought better of it. I decided it’s much more his country than it is mine, not to mention that his English wasn’t all that good and my Setswana is a heck of a lot worse so I probably couldn’t have communicated too much anyway.

For your viewing pleasure

2008-03-31T11:17:00.000-07:00

This little guy was discovered clambering around my bedroom walls and resisted capture for quite some time. That's my hand...thanks goes to Stefan's picture-taking abilities and sweet camera for the nice shot.

an epic

2008-03-31T11:04:00.001-07:00

I decided to take two days to drive up to Maun, and it turned out to be a good decision. I knew I still had some problems with the Land Rover, but I didn’t know that it would take me quite as long as it did to make the journey. To keep the pressure from building too much in the cooling system and pushing water out of the pressure cap, I had to drive at speeds of 70-80 km/hr most of the way (that’s about 45-50 mph). I left Wednesday afternoon and made it 50 km past Serowe, or a bit over a third of the way, where I drove a few hundred meters off the road into the bush and slept in the rooftop tent. Trying to take advantage of the cool early morning, I got up at 4am Thursday and hit the road. By mid-morning I had been making good time, so I was happy to stop and help a pair of Motswana who were broken down by the side of the road. They had a flat tire, and since their spare was also flat (pretty much a given with most cars here), they needed a ride into the nearest village to get a tire repaired. The small hydraulic jack they had also didn’t fit under the chassis since the flat tire made it too low, so I dug out my hi-lift jack to give them a hand. While we were working, a semi-truck pulled up and the driver asked if I might have a “floating spanner” (which I accurately deduced to mean “adjustable wrench”) that he could borrow to adjust his clutch (I did). I felt like a rolling toolshed. Anyway, after dropping the fellow off at a little tin shack in the village that purported to be a tyre shop, I continued on my way. Then, as I passed by the village of Rakops, on the edge of the Kalahari, I impulsively decided to stop by and see John Walters. John is a missionary who I had met once in Gabs as he passed through. The german short-termers also spent 3 weeks with him doing a village live-in, so I had heard a lot about him. I didn’t intend to stay long, but, as seems to always be the case in Botswana, a “short” visit turned into a long-winded tour of the town complete with stories about all kinds of different things. John Walters is a pretty amazing guy who has accomplished some wonderful things in that village, and my visit there deserves a whole story of its own. But suffice it to say that I spent a lot of time there and ended up getting to Maun quite a bit later than I expected. After that, though, it was smooth sailing, and I arrived at the Flying Mission house where I was greeted by Tim, our chief pilot. So, finally, my vehicle has, through thick and thin, made it the whole way here. Now I just have to get it fixed…

Maun!

2008-03-29T07:43:00.000-07:00

Well I have finally arrived at my new home in Maun. It has been quite a journey...I started out driving on Wednesday afternoon, finally arrived late Thursday, spent one night in the house here and then ended up back in Gabs the next night anyway. But more details on that later. For now i don't have a lot of time. But suffice it to say that I have arrived in Maun to stay. I've done a training flight with our chief pilot, Tim, already, and tomorrow we start on the first of a string of charter flights to safari camps in the Delta. It's nice to finally have made it, although my vehicle troubles are still weighing on my mind. I'll have to start taking care of that early next week, probably on my free day Tuesday.

Into the Wilds

2008-03-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

In the last week of February, a friend of mine visited from the states, and since one of the other short-termers (Jess Cosby) had visitors as well, we took a trip together into the wilds of northern Botswana. We met up in Kasane, in the far north-eastern corner of Botswana, and spent one night there before heading into Chobe National Park for two days and a night in the park along the Chobe River. Once Jess’ brother got over his fear of being eaten by lions and we got somewhat used to the huge swarms of insects attracted to our light, we had a good time camping. It’s nearing the end of the rainy season here, so everything was green and the undergrowth had grown quite thick. Because of the thick brush and the water that the rains have made available deep in the park away from the river, the animal life there wasn’t quite as abundant as when my family was there last year. It was still quite ripe with life, though, and we saw most of the large animals along with a vast number of different kinds of birds. We were planning on driving through the Chobe park south to Moremi, another national park on the edge of the Okavango Delta. The attendant at the park gate, however, informed us that the recent abundant rains had made the road impassable. That was a bit of a disappointment, but instead we took the long way around on paved roads, staying a night in Gweta on the way. On the road into Moremi National Park we had what was for me the most exciting wildlife encounter of the trip…as we were driving along, I saw an animal slowly entering the road from the right a few hundred feet ahead. I quickly recognized that it was a cat of some kind, and we stopped to watch it from afar so we wouldn’t scare it away. It crouched down on the edge of the road, looking intently into the bushes on the other side (at an impala, we later discovered). We were pretty far away from it, but looking through binoculars we could see that it was a leopard. It stayed long enough for us to all get a bit of a look in the binoculars and then got up and paced off into the bushes. It was the first leopard that I’ve seen (leopard sightings are quite rare – they’re pretty difficult to spot and don’t hang out in the open as much as lions), and I think it’s my new favorite big cat. From there, we continued into the park and spent two nights there. While the animal life was harder to spot in Moremi, we still were able to see quite a bit. We also took an hour-long boat ride through the fringes of the Okavango Delta, which was a great experience also. Finally, on the way back to Gaborone, we overnighted at the Khama Rhino Sanctuary, which has, in addition to a large number of rhinos, many different kinds of antelope, cats, and birds. There we finally sighted the elusive zebra, most of which have retreated to the inland grasslands in the rainy season. It was a wonderful trip, and we had a lot of fun. I’ve posted a few teaser pictures here, and made two new photo albums on my google pictures site here and here.

2008-03-24T07:12:00.000-07:00

This is why we couldn't camp at third bridge, our original plan. The rains had flooded a lot of the park, and we had to toil through some pretty deep puddles too drive around. Like up over the bottom door edge of the Land Rover deep.

2008-03-24T07:10:00.000-07:00

Our leopard sighting from afar.

2008-03-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

Our tents survive a flood. Sat the night in inch-deep water at Gweta without leaking a bit.

2008-03-24T07:08:00.000-07:00

Camp and the all-important tea, at the Ihaha campsite in Chobe.

2008-03-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

Sunset over the chobe river.

2008-03-24T07:04:00.000-07:00

This guy got really close and tolerated us watching him for a while. Then he got a little huffy, swung his head back and forth, and snorted at us. That's when we thought it prudent to start driving away.

2008-03-24T07:02:00.000-07:00

Grazing Giraffes in Chobe

Gabs Again

2008-03-17T04:19:00.000-07:00

Following the trend of recent events, my move to Maun has once again been unexpectedly pushed back. On Saturday Tim, our chief pilot, and myself were planning to drive together up to Maun so that he could do my orientation and training flights in the Delta this week. We left early in the morning and had made it the whole way to Serowe (nearly halfway to Maun, or about 3-4 hours driving) when we began having problems with my Land Rover. The water temperature gauge has been acting strangely for quite a while, so I didn’t think anything of it when the gauge dropped to zero for the last hour or so that we’d been driving. As we drove into Serowe, though, I noticed water streaming out from under the hood and could hear that the pressure relief cap was, well, relieving pressure. So we knew something was wrong. We were stopping for fuel anyway in Serowe, so we let it cool down a bit and then continued on our way. After a bit, strange things started to happen and the engine started losing power and surging. We stopped and decided to try removing the thermostat to see if a stuck thermostat was causing the overheating problems. We couldn’t find the thermostat (a nice man in a Land Cruiser stopped to help us out), but discovered when no water shot out the hose where we took it apart that the cooling system was nearly dry. Anyway, to make a long story short, we decided to turn back to gabs rather than risk getting stranded along the remote stretch of desert between Serowe and Maun, where cell phone coverage would be irregular and passers-by few. On the way back, the vehicle was fine (we think a big part of the overheating might have been the strong headwind we had on the way up – the land rover isn’t really a highway vehicle to start with). So now I’m back in Gabs and will spend this week trying to get the problem sorted out so that I can either sell it or take it to Maun with me later. That’s the latest in my saga of attempts to move to Maun…I’ll keep you posted. Now looks like I’ll probably make my next attempt next weekend, but we shall see.

One of these days....

2008-03-08T06:50:00.000-08:00

For quite some time now, I've been expecting to make a move from Gaborone to Maun in the northern part of Botswana, but the move keeps getting pushed back. Well, it appears that the event may actually be in sight. The plan for now is to move towards the end of next week. There is a string of flights starting next Sunday, so I should be moved in time to make those flights. As sad as it will be to leave my housemates and other friends that I've made here in Gabs, I'm excited to finally be in Maun after a long time of expectation. Before then, though, there's a lot that I need to do: pack, finish up some items at work here, finalize the details of selling my vehicle (hopefully), etc. So right now I'm off to tidy up the Land Rover before I get rid of it. I would write a bit about our trip into the national parks but I don't have my pictures with me, and stories like that are worthless without illustration. Next week.

trips and things

2008-03-03T10:20:00.000-08:00

I just got back from a nice vacation trip to the northern part of Botswana, where I traveled for a week with some friends. Then, hours after returning, I went on a mercy flight to Maun. Now it's nighttime and I'm home again, but very tired and hungry after having no supper. Therefore I will write sometime later about my trip and maybe even post some pictures. but for now i'm going to eat and to bed.

Ghanzi and Back (the promised photo-story)

2008-02-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday, I had some work to do on the vehicle that I'm trying to sell, so Stefan and came out to the hangar. He played around on his laptop while I worked on the Land Rover. In the afternoon, as we were getting ready to leave, I got a call for a mercy flight to Ghanzi. Stefan had been dying to go along on one of our flights, so I called Mark (the Director of Operations) and asked if it would be okay if he rode along. It was, and Stefan was tickled. Stefan is quite the amateur photographer, so his official duty during the flight was to take pictures (that's why this is a photo story). Since I was at the hangar already, I did the preflight inspection, filed the flight plan, and got the airplane all ready to go. Matt and the paramedics arrived pretty quickly, and when they did we all jumped in and blasted off. The patient was a pregnant woman who was having fits of some kind, and the doctors were worried that the fetus wouldn't be getting enough oxygen. It was a fairly uneventful trip to Ghanzi, flying into the setting sun. Ghanzi is in the far western part of Botswana, across the Central Kalahari that dominates the middle of the country. We arrived just before sunset, and the ambulance was waiting on us there. We quickly loaded the patient (who was luckily pretty light) and headed off before it could get dark enough for them to have to set up the portable runway lights. On the way back, Stefan got stuck on the little potty seat in the back and probably got a bit of a cramped neck from the lack of headspace, but he says it was worth it. It was worth it for me too, because I finally got some decent pictures of a full mercy flight without having to remember to bring my camera along. Enjoy the pics.

2008-02-22T06:09:00.000-08:00

They even let me fly from the left seat now. Fancy that. I still can't be captain because the contract with the Ministry of Health states that the captain needs 1,500 hours of flight time, and I fall about 500 hours short of that right now.

2008-02-22T06:05:00.000-08:00

The weather was decent, but we had to wind our way around a few little buildups like this one. Luckily it had cleared up on the way back in the dark (when it's quite tough to see clouds and the storms that they hide).

2008-02-22T06:00:00.000-08:00

Moagi, one of our Rescue One paramedics, catches some shut-eye on the way to Ghanzi.

2008-02-22T05:55:00.000-08:00

The photographer himself.

2008-02-22T05:50:00.000-08:00

Matt does his radio duties.

2008-02-22T05:45:00.000-08:00

Very short final to runway 08 in Ghanzi

2008-02-22T05:40:00.000-08:00

Getting ready to load the patient.

2008-02-22T05:35:00.000-08:00

The Ghanzi airport control tower (hut?)

2008-02-22T05:30:00.000-08:00

The medics working hard.

2008-02-22T05:25:00.000-08:00

Unloading the patient in Gaborone for transport to the referral hospital, Princess Marina Hospital.

Off...

2008-02-18T22:47:00.000-08:00

Today's my off day, but I'm at the hangar now. Why, you might ask? Well, I didn't really know it was an off day for sure until I got here. The schedule is pretty crazy right now because things keep changing with airplanes and pilots and flights and such, so one never knows. But I'm taking some vacation time next week, which I'm looking forward to. For now though, I'm gonna go and do what really should be done on an off day...run around and take care of business that is overdue. And then go home and relax. Coming soon...a story complete with pictures. Stay tuned.

In The Dark

2008-02-14T04:18:00.001-08:00

A few years back, I remember hearing stories about “rolling power outages” in California. I don’t think I stopped to think about it too much at the time, but I’m beginning to wonder if such episodes might not become normal parts of life even in our little haven of endless resources in the US. Power shortages have suddenly become very real here in Botswana…it’s a reality that it seems nobody anticipated until too late and one that people are going to have to learn to live with. The real shortages are in South Africa, because Botswana gets nearly all of its power from its big neighbor to the south. Apparently even some of the big mines in South Africa were shut down for lack of power for a few days, which must have cost the companies and the country millions in lost revenue. Flying Mission has purchased a few small generators to have around and one big one to be installed at the hangar, since power goes off randomly fairly often and work basically comes to a standstill without it. It’s not the households that are hit the hardest by power cuts…after all, the worst that can happen is candlelight dinners and maybe a few rotten fridge items…but businesses must lose a lot of money when they lose power. Matt and I were walking around a big fancy western-style mall in Johannesburg when the power went off, and most of the stores had to close their doors (I would assume for security reasons). The lucky ones have some standby power with a few lights and cash registers working, but even there it seems like they lose quite a few customers. No coffee was to be had at the coffee shop. The worst of it, though, is the traffic lights. Traffic in Joburg is horrific already, but when large areas of the city are without power and the lights don’t work, it can be an absolute nightmare. Once in a while, at a major intersection, some traffic cops might arrive before the power comes back on, but usually it’s up to the drivers to negotiate, which is painfully slow. Anyway…it’s amazing how much we rely on electricity. It will be interesting to see how the demands for power and other natural resources (especially fossil fuels) play out in the next decades. Unless we come up with some better solutions soon, we are either going to have to learn to do with less or we will force a lot of people in the world to go without (that’s probably happening already I suppose). I guess I’m worried about the violence that could erupt (and already has?) around the competition for our limited resources, but we’ll see. So do your part! That’s me standing on my poorly constructed, rambly conservation soapbox.

Village

2008-02-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

Visits to Mochudi to see my friend Bessie continue to be some of the most refreshing and relaxing parts of my time here. Whenever I have the time to (which hasn’t been all that often lately) I like to take the bus-ride up to Mochudi. From the village center where the bus drops me off, I flag down the route 3 combi and ride it for a few miles to a little store, where I pay my 40 US cents, get off the combi, and walk another 20 minutes or so to Bessie’s house. I love walking through the village after the hustle and bustle of the city. Old women, sitting in their fenced-in yards under a tree or on their porch (if they’re lucky enough to have one), talk to the neighbors, prepare a meal, or just enjoy the afternoon. They nearly all greet me as I pass down the dirt road, and if there are children running around the yard they’ll stop to shyly wave or try out their English greetings. Here and there a donkey cart with a team of donkeys stand under a tree, lazily swinging their tales and not taking notice of much other than the flies on their backsides. If it’s later in the afternoon, groups of chattering school kids pass by, slowly making their way home (and giving me obvious looks, probably wondering what in the world a “lekgoa” like me is doing walking around their roads). It’s a much slower pace of life, and walking through it makes me feel a bit more in touch with Botswana and its people, many of whom still live in rural villages despite the rapid urbanization that is taking place here.

For those of you who helped out with Bessie’s house-building project, you should know that she is getting close to being able to break ground. When I visited her last week, she had purchased all of the doorframes and windowframes that she needs. She had been planning to buy a load of sand, but decided that with all the recent heavy rains it would probably be a better idea to wait for a bit so it doesn’t all wash away. The rains are slowly ending, though, so soon they should be able to start tearing down the little pantry-type building that now stands where the new house will go. I will keep you updated as things progress.

Moving (home again?)

2008-02-05T03:31:00.000-08:00

In general, I haven’t reflected too much on the fact that being here in Botswana is coming back to a place that I once would have called home. In some ways, since the memories I have of this place are so dim and more attached to physical places than feelings of home or comfort or identity, it seems like it hasn’t made much of a difference in my experience here. I know that I’ve been here before…it was all I knew of life for the first seven years…but haven’t attached a whole lot of significance to that. This past week, though, we (the short-termers) moved from our home to a new house across town, which happens to be the same house that I spent the first two years of my life in. It’s changed quite a bit since then, but it’s odd to be able to point to corners and say “that’s where that couch was in all those pictures of me in a diaper trying to walk,” or “along this wall was the cabinet that I used to crawl into and play ‘airplane.’” It’s like I’m an intruder on my history or something. But I guess it’s kinda neat to be living in the same house again under such different circumstances. Anyway, it’s made me think a bit more about my history here in Botswana.

In other developments, two weeks ago Matt and I took our written tests in Joburg to get our South African licenses, and just last Sunday we flew down to take our flight test. Luckily we both passed on the first try, and it feels great to have that over with. That process has been hanging over my head for the past two months, and I’m ready to be done with all the stress and studying that goes along with it. That’s been keeping me busy, along with all the flying that I’ve been doing. January was a particularly busy month, and I logged the highest number of hours in one month that I’ve had since I’ve been here (78, for those who care). So that’s the update for now….standby for more one of these days soon. Love,

Travis

Etc.

2008-02-01T06:47:00.000-08:00

I knew it was getting hotter here when I got in the car this afternoon and basically scalded my hands on the steering wheel and stickshift handle. I literally couldn't touch either of them for more than a few seconds without it being quite painful. So just as I got done saying how nice the cool rain was, the rain stopped, the clouds disappeared and the sun came out. It's pretty brutal too...normally the heat is dry here, but all the recent rains have apparently provided plenty of humidity, and just walking anywhere outside brings instant sweat to the surface. Oh well.

Otherwise, things have been pretty busy around here, which is most of the reason that I've been doing a poor job of updating the blog. The airplane that we are leasing to use in Maun is registered in South Africa, so in order to fly it we all need to have South African validations on our licenses. That basically means that we need to take a written test on South African aviation regulations and also take a flight test. So last week, Matt and I drove down to South Africa to take our written tests (which we both passed, thank goodness). Now this weekend, we will be flying our leased King Air down to Johannesburg to take a flight test. It's a bit of an intimidating venture for me, because it's been a long time since I've done emergency training in multi-engine aircraft and it will be the first time that I really take a flight test in a turbine aircraft or any aircraft as big as this one. I've done a few training flights with one of our training captains here, Dan Shenk, but it's still a bit nerve-wracking. After Sunday, it should be all over, though, as long as things go well. I've also been doing some training on our Cessna 210 in the last weeks, and took my checkride on that aircraft with our Chief Pilot. So the last month has been a lot of training and learning for me. In addition, I've been helping out with some of the maintenance office work, trying to get data entered into some new software that we just purchased and finish out all of our billing and paperwork for maintenance from last year. They've kept me going pretty steady, but I'm enjoying it. Better busy than not having anything to do for sure. So that's a quick update. I'll try to be more regular with the posts in the near future...but I just seem to run out of time. Life in the fast lane, I guess.

Storms

2008-01-24T12:15:00.000-08:00

As a pilot, I suppose you could say I’ve got a bit of a love-hate relationship with thunderstorms. Storms can be quite dangerous for airplanes and have knocked down more than a few perfectly healthy machines over the years, so I spend many of my summer days here winding around towering storm clouds and giving them a respectful berth. If we get a call for an air ambulance flight and there are storms building around the country, I know that we very well may have to deviate and that the trip will probably take a bit longer. Storms can be especially troublesome at night, when all we can see of them are countless flashes of lightning that sometimes seem to come from all directions at once and we have to rely on our less-than-perfect weather radar to avoid them. On the other hand, when I have off days or days without any flights, watching the storms here is one of my favorite things to do. When we get a big storm (which has happened several times in the last few weeks) I often grab a book and sit out on our back porch, looking up once and again to marvel at the dark skies, the pounding rain, and the flashes of lighting and thunder. Every once in a while, we’ll get a few days in a row of overcast skies and some fairly steady rain. For the most part, though, the storms are isolated. Driving home from the airport the other day, the skies were clear except for a huge storm cloud that was towering over an area just west of our house. The base of the cloud was an angry, deep black, with roiling curls of grey cloud being pushed out the front of the storm by the downdrafts and a huge veil of heavy rain descending from the center. As I got closer, it was apparent that the storm was headed for the house, so as soon as I got home I fetched my book and settled down to watch the show. And what a show it was. I am continually amazed at the power unleashed under these beasts. Power to pound the soil with relentless rains, to fell trees and kill livestock with a bolt of lightning, to rip the wings from an airplane. And next to all their destructive power stands their power to bring refreshing, life-giving water to this parched desert country. It is this power that trumps all others in the end, and I’m slowly getting used to people telling me how wonderful the weather is on a damp, rainy, grey day. Prayers for rain have been spoken again and again over the past months, and the rain has come. I believe I mentioned that the rainy season started early this year, and after a relatively dry stretch for a few months, the rain has returned with a vengeance in the last weeks. All too soon, however, the rain will be over and the dry season will be upon us, so I’m enjoying the coolness and the storms while I can.

Busses and early mornings

2008-01-18T06:41:00.000-08:00

My word, it's been a whole week since I last posted...feels like just yesterday that I was writing something for the blog. Time continues to fly by and I have a hard time believing that I'm soon going to be reaching the halfway point in my time here. Somehow I've been keeping busy, although I haven't been doing much out of the ordinary.
Flying has been pretty regular for the past week or so. There seems to have been a rash of bad bus accidents...two days in a row we had calls from hospitals saying they had 4+ patients from a bus accident that needed transport (first one from Hukuntsi, the second from Maun). Luckily, the two pilots who were off on the day of the Hukuntsi accident happened to be around town, and they scrambled to bring the second airplane so we could take two stretcher patients in a short time. Dan and I had already been on a flight earlier, so left from Francistown where we dropped the first patient and met the other airplane in Hukuntsi. As we loaded the patients there, we had the biggest crowd of spectators that I've seen yet, and we had to keep pushing them back so the paramedics had room to move the patients and eventually so we could start up and taxi out. The next day, Matt and I went to Maun when they called with their bus accident...we managed to squeeze two stretchers into the King Air (normally we only take one stretcher at a time), and the rest of the 6 patients who needed transport were eventually taken by road.
And then the last two days we both had late night calls, with the result that we left at daybreak both days for flights. So between all of that, I'm feeling pretty beat and ready for some sleep. But I'm still loving the flying, and all is well on this side of the globe. Peace...
Travis

South Africa

2008-01-11T08:30:00.000-08:00

Accidents and illnesses know no season, so a side-effect of doing air ambulance flights is working on holidays, weekends, etc when much of the world is free from obligations. While I was on call over both Christmas week and New Year's, I made up for it by taking the week before Christmas off. Not just for the heck of it, but because my dad happened to be coming through South Africa for a few days for his job and I went to visit him. So I packed up and headed south in the Land Rover for the week. The trip down was an epic 18-hour battle against an overheating engine (due to, as I mentioned before, a lost radiator cap), having to stop in the dark to add water next to signs saying "do not stop - hijacking hotspot" and such (crime in South Africa is rapidly becoming quite a problem in places). But I finally made it, dragging into the lodge where my dad was staying around 1:30 am. So I hung out for a few days with my dad, which was wonderful. Unfortunately, he had to leave two days earlier than he had planned to and I didn't get to spend nearly the time with him that I had hoped. The rooms at the lodge had already been payed for, however, and it was too late to get any refund on them, so I just decided to stay for three more nights there before heading back to Botswana to start work again. So I relaxed at the lodge, drove around and saw the sights in the area, went to Kruger Nat'l Park (the biggest park in South Africa), went to a reptile farm, and just generally took it easy. Oh, and bought a new radiator cap. It was wonderfully relaxing week and it was great to see my dad for a bit, so i considered that my Christmas holiday. I've posted a few pictures for some visual stimulation. Enjoy.

2008-01-11T08:12:00.000-08:00

My first rhino sighting. There are quite a few in South African parks, as it turns out, because I ended up seeing a total of 8 or so during my time there. This guy's a pretty small one, which I only know because I saw some monsters in Kruger Park.

2008-01-11T08:01:00.000-08:00

A beautiful South African valley. There's a spectacular waterfull just to the bottom-right of the frame that I didn't manage to take any good pictures of. This landscape was absolutely stunning after 6 months of confinement to the flat-as-a-pancakeness of brown Botswana.

2008-01-11T07:42:00.000-08:00

A small gorge where the rushing water has worn some cool pothole-like things in the rocks.

Gone fishin'

2008-01-04T06:57:00.002-08:00

I've gone fishing a few times in my life, but those times were long, long ago (in a very innocent and idyllic youth). The truth is, however, that I look quite fondly upon the times I remember fishing, so I was excited to have the opportunity to do it again last week. Luke and Graham, two young men from Canada who recently arrived as returning long-term missionaries with Flying Mission, are avid fishermen and invited me on a trip to Mafikeng, just across the South African border. We decided to make a day of it, and although it was already lunch time by the time we got to the dam where we were fishing, we got quite a few hours of fishing in. We caught a few fish here and there, all of them largemouth bass. The fishing was a bit slow most of the time, but the best part of the day for me was just getting away from the house and the airport and spending time outdoors under the sun around a pretty lake. Most of the fish we caught were too small to keep and we had to throw them back. Actually, to be honest, I was having quite bad luck with the fishing, and hadn't had more than a few serious nibbles on my line all day. We were just getting ready to pack it in so we could make the drive back in daylight (roads here are dangerous at night, what with all the cows and goats and such wandering around), and decided to take a few more casts. Graham, who had stopped fishing already, was watching and told me it was now or never...we needed a fish big enough for dinner. Well, it just so happened that right about then there was an obliging decent-sized bass that decided to go for my bait, and after a short struggle when he got tied up in a fence a few feet offshore, we had dinner. So we packed him in, headed home, and fried the tasty little guy up. He went down real nice with some tartar sauce and chips on the side.

Christmas Update

2007-12-28T14:33:00.000-08:00

As I've been reminded a few times recently, I am long overdue in updating here. But I'm tired and ready to crash into bed, so I'll make it brief. The last weeks have been quite busy in a lot of ways, even though the flying has been really slow and I haven't been working all that much. In the last week plus, I have done all of the following:

-Spent a few days in South Africa with my dad, who was coming through with work (the drive down took 18 hours when it should have taken 9 due to a lost radiator cap and much time spent waiting for the engine to cool down, averaging about 30 mph much of the time).
-Moved into a house where I'll be house-sitting for two weeks
-Studied extensively for the South African air-law exam
-Threw a birthday part for one of the other short-termers
-Had a Christmas party
-Went to a Christmas barbecue with a bunch of other people from Flying Mission and the area
-Went for a day fishing trip with two fellow Flying Mission volunteers in South Africa and fried up a good fresh bass.
-Spent a good amount of time cleaning up the Land Rover and trying to fix a leaking tire
-Took an airplane up to Maun and brought another one back
-Whiled away a good number of hours hanging out with all the great short-termers that are here (3 from Germany, 1 from Switzerland, 1 from England, and 2 from Canada)

So that's a little taste of my holiday weeks, with a lot of other little things thrown in there fore good measure. It was definitely a different Christmas, what with it being very hot, having no family around, not having the radio filled with lame christmas music and the streets filled with decorations, etc. But it's been a good time of connecting and spending time with people around here. So that's my life in a nutshell...more to come later, but for now I need some sleep.

Flood at Lillian's house

2007-12-08T05:36:00.000-08:00

The other morning, as i was getting ready to leave the house for the airport, we got a call from somebody at the office telling us that Lillian's house was flooding and could we go over and see if they needed our help. Well, we could, so we did. It had rained heavily for a long time during the night, but the waters just started coming up a few hours after the rain was done, coming downriver from the south. What we found, though, was more than we expected. I've put up a few pictures below to give you an idea. Luckily the water didn't get into the main house, and only a few items from the servant's quarters were damaged. It could have been much worse.

2007-12-08T05:32:00.000-08:00

Taking out the fridge. Christian and I came over to help, but by the time we got there they were basically finished getting the furniture and stuff out, so we stood around and took pictures.

The woods behind their house, where a little trickle normally flows (and even that only in the rainy season). Also the woods where the thieves seem to enjoy hiding. Turned into a raging river.

Playing in the yard. When the water went down, the neighbors discovered a few large snakes in their yard, which would make you think twice about letting your kid do this.

The back of the house.

2007-12-08T05:18:00.001-08:00

The view from the front gate. At this point the water had started to go down already. Luckily it never reached the main house, just the servants quarters, where Lesedi, a girl who I have gotten to know some from church, is living.

Start placing bets...

2007-12-08T05:04:00.000-08:00

On whether or not I'll ever move up to Maun, that is. As you might know, I've been planning to move up to the village of Maun in the north to start doing charter flights into the Okavango Delta for some time now. We've got a contract with a camp up there that will start in January, and originally it was planned that I would move around October or something like that. Well, things happen, and we're so tight on pilots that I will probably be staying in Gabs until the last two weeks of January or so. We only have a few flights scheduled in Maun in January, so we will just go up for the couple of days we need to be there for those flights, and then come back down. But February starts getting busy, so that's when I'll really need to be up there. The plan now is to take the last week or so of January as moving time and then be up and running in Maun by the beginning of February. For the first little while I will be doing most of my flying with another pilot in the company who is familiar with the delta and with operations up there to get my training in, and then they will let me loose. I'm pretty excited about the flying up there, but I'm also just as happy to stay here in Gaborone for a bit longer. I think once I head up to Maun I probably won't be coming back here for a while, if at all, so I'm actually glad to get some more time in the King Air and on the medical flights before I leave. Not to mention that it is nice to have time to spend with the Flying Mission people that I have gotten to know here before I go and live more or less on my own. And I will be around for Christmas, which will be nice. So anyway, that's the update from this part of the world. Keep in touch.

All work and no play?

2007-12-05T06:13:00.000-08:00

Mark had asked me last week if I had any good pictures of the King Air with a sunset or something like that to put on a Flying Mission Christmas card that he’s making. I didn’t really, but in talking about it, he mentioned that what he really wanted was some shots of the King Air in flight. I didn’t think much of it, but a few days later we had a day with a nice solid overcast layer (which is very rare around here) and Mark made a spur-of-the-moment decision that we would go up and take some pictures of the King Air, using a 210 as the photo plane. So we called Stefan, our resident photographer, to see if he could come. Stefan was giddy at the opportunity both to fly and to take air-to-air pictures, so he begged off of the work that was planned for him at the office and came out to the airport as quickly as he could. I flew the 210 as the photo plane (and the lead plane of the formation) and Dan flew the King Air. It was the first time that I had really done any formation flying, and it was a lot of fun. We first buzzed along under the clouds and took a few shots against the ground and the horizon, and then climbed up through the clouds and took some shots on top of the solid cloud layer in the sun. We wasted a lot of time trying to find each other after coming up through the clouds and then rejoining formation after a few of the maneuvers, I think mostly because both Dan and I were fairly inexperienced with formation flying. I didn’t help that the King Air is pretty slippery and was hard to get slowed down to match speeds after Dan caught up with us. We flew for a bit over an hour, and Stefan ended up with about 1,200 pictures. A few of those turned out pretty nicely, and I’ll post a few here for your viewing enjoyment as soon as I pilfer them from Stefan. It was a great experience, and it was fun to be able to get up and mess around a bit doing something out of the usual routine.

2007-11-30T05:14:00.000-08:00

Some cool clouds over the wing of the King Air that looked a lot crazier in real life. A few minutes ago there was a sweet sunset that I unfortunately didn't get any good pictures of. Sunsets and sweet clouds are some of my favorite things about flying here, at least during the summer when there actually are clouds around.

2007-11-30T05:02:00.000-08:00

Aaron Hoffman, a short-termer from Flying Mission in Zambia, helps install a new leading edge for a STOL kit on the 206 they flew down from Zambia. Aaron stayed with us in the short-termer house for two weeks, and his haircut is my handiwork (of which I'm very proud). We had a good time playing chess, talking airplanes, and watching the occasional movie. A part of my work for the past weeks has been helping the Zambia guys find parts and get everything figured out for their work here.

2007-11-30T04:58:00.000-08:00

Dan and Matt return from a mercy flight at the end of the day.

Circle of Life

2007-11-22T06:40:00.000-08:00

The last week was quite a busy one, with at least one flight every day until Friday. The last flight of the week, however, was probably the hardest and most tiring flight that I have made yet. Francistown is usually where we take patients from all over the country, but if they have a patient that is too serious for them to deal with, we sometimes fly the patient to Lanseria airport in Johannesburg, South Africa where they have specialists and more special equipment. On this particular flight, we picked up a car accident victim in Francistown who was in a very critical and unstable condition. I’ll spare you the details of how he looked, but the patient was on a ventilator and completely unaware of what was going on around him. We took off for Lanseria, staying low to keep the cabin pressure from dropping. About 30 minutes into the flight, the paramedic tapped me on the shoulder and said we needed to turn around immediately and descend to get the cabin pressure as low as possible, which we did. When we landed back in Francistown, we learned that the paramedics had lost the patient and begun resuscitation, and by the time we landed they had revived him and he seemed a bit more stable. The paramedic deemed him too unstable to fly and took him back to the hospital. As we were getting ready to leave to go home to Gaborone, the paramedics got a call from a doctor at the hospital and a bit of conflict ensued, with the end result being that we were told we needed to fly the patient anyway. So the medics went back to the hospital to pick up the patient, we helped load the (very heavy) patient for the second time, and we took off again for Lanseria. This time, the patient died about 40 minutes into the flight, and all the paramedics’ attempts at resuscitation were unsuccessful. The paramedic let us know, and said that since we were under doctor’s orders to take the patient to Lanseria, we had to continue the flight even though we knew the patient was dead. So we continued to Lanseria and landed there, hoping to be met by a morgue vehicle that would take the body so we could fly back home. We quickly learned it was going to be a lot more complicated than that, however, as the South African police told us they couldnot accept the body. We sat in Lanseria for several hours, talking with the police and anybody we could think of who might know what to do. At one point, it seemed like we were stuck because the police couldn’t take the body and we thought that it would be illegal for us to fly back to Botswana with the body. It was quite a mess. Finally, Brandan called a doctor friend of his in Johanneburg somewhere who did this sort of medical flying into the country quite regularly, and learned that since the patient had died before clearing customs into South Africa and was technically still “in transit,” we needed to take him back to Botswana. So we ended up flying back to Gaborone with the body, arriving just before the airport closed at 10pm. It was a long day. That was the first patient to die on a plane I was flying, so I guess after the baby born on the plane, I’ve sort of brought the cycle of life full-circle. Or something like that. The most difficult part of this medical flying is seeing some of the patients in such a painful condition, and especially seeing some of them pass away. While this was the first patient to actually die on the aircraft, this past week has seen two other patients dying before we were able to reach them, so it’s been a rough week. The last couple of days, however, have slowed down quite a bit and it’s been a bit more relaxing, which is nice for a change. Peace, and keep well.

Placebos and stuff

2007-11-12T10:48:00.000-08:00

While I guess I always sort of believed that the placebo effect existed in sort of vague and flimsy way, I was given a pretty convincing demonstration of it on a flight we had the other day. The patient was a young man who was being transported because of apparently undiagnosed severe stomach pain. Either the paramedics or the doctor in Kasane, I’m not sure which, gave the preliminary diagnosis that the patient was experiencing symptoms of opiate withdrawal. Right from the get-go, the patient was continually asking for morphine or other pain-killers, and at points throughout the flight I could hear Brandan, our usual flight paramedic, explaining to him why he couldn’t give him the painkillers he wanted. The patient was very restless for most of the flight, getting up and down, hanging over seat backs, and continually asking for painkillers. All of a sudden, near the end of the flight, he became very quiet and lay down on the stretcher underneath a blanket. As I was wondering what brought about this change, Brandan passed up a note saying that he had told the patient that he was injecting him with morphine and actually just gave him a harmless anti-nausea drug. The patient apparently thought he was high and immediately relaxed and passed out on the stretcher. It was a pretty impressive demonstration of how much of a mental thing addiction is and how strong the placebo effect can be at times.

It has been quite a busy week, and we’ve had at least one flight every day the past week from Monday to Saturday except one, and several days we’ve had multiple flights. In fact, on Thursday we had four calls for flights in one day. Two of them got cancelled, so we only ended up doing two flights, but it was still a pretty long day. So I’ve been keeping busy and not doing very well at keeping up on emailing and all the other little things that crop up outside of work. I’m also advertising my vehicle to sell now, and have been spending some time getting it ready for sale and dealing with the advertising companies and all of that jazz. Anyway, that’s a quick update on what’s going on here…more to come someday later, with a few pictures even. Til then.

SOS Children’s Village

2007-11-10T05:56:00.000-08:00

The SOS Children’s Village is large complex in Tlokweng (a few minutes southeast of Gaborone, near the border) where 200+ orphans and vulnerable children live together in community houses, each of which has a house mother. Deborah and Sarah, two other Flying Mission volunteers, have recently been hatching the idea of offering after-school homework help one or two evenings a week. Last week, I had Wednesday off and was able to go along with them for their first evening of work there. We got there early, believe it or not, and so sat around waiting for them to be ready for us. Eventually, we were introduced to about four kids who apparently had somehow been selected from their houses or volunteered or something, and were supposed to have homework for us to do. They led us by the hand to their various houses, where we sat down with them and started working (more or less) on some homework they needed help with. My little boy, Thabo, resisting stubbornly all of my attempts at conversation, led me to his room, opened his backpack, closed it again, and indicated that he had no homework to do (again not speaking, communicating instead with the common upward-facing open palm wave that he had nothing). Well, I wasn’t sure what to do so I hung out in his room for a while trying unsuccessfully to chat with Thabo and chatting a little more successfully with some of his housemates. To my relief, I discovered that one of his housemates needed some help with math homework, so I helped him do some metric conversions for a while and then left when we were finished to see if any of my compadres had had any more luck. I found Stefan on one of the house porches surrounded by a loud and animated group of kids. There were three homework books open on the table but very little homework getting done, as the kids were much more interested in asking Stefan questions and generally having a good time. I sat down with them and soon found myself helping Thapang with his math homework. He is a fun kid who really seemed to enjoy doing his homework when someone paid enough attention to him to appreciate what he was doing (before I came and sat down with him, he was very distracted by the other kids and didn’t seem to be getting much done). Every time he got an answer right, he would give me a high-five and the African thumb-press handshake that the younger people here give to each other. We had a lot of fun, and I enjoyed getting to know Thapang. After we finished, we joined the rest of the kids in talking about all kinds of random things from Germany and the US to dancing and music. You could tell they really enjoyed the attention and were having a grand time. After meeting Thapang’s older brother and running around in the rain with Thapang on my shoulders, it was soon time to leave. We had a great time there, though, and I look forward to being able to go back on days when I’m not on call. I have really enjoyed catching these glimpses of Flying Mission’s ministry here and getting involved on a hands-on level with some of the people of this country. In some ways, it makes me wish that I was a normal short-termer like Stefan and Christian who get to do things like this several days of the week. At the same time, though, I’m loving my work here and wouldn’t give it up for anything. Well, that’s enough writing to poop me out for the time being…keep in touch and stay well.

Life of a Pilot

2007-10-30T02:05:00.000-07:00

The last few days of flying have been some of the best flying days that I’ve had yet. On Friday we had an afternoon flight taking a patient Maun to Francistown and on Saturday we had a flight to Hukuntsi and then one from Kasane to Francistown. It just so happened that both flights back to Gabs from Francistown occurred around the same time in the evening, right around sunset. There was a low overcast layer of clouds and some higher clouds both evenings, so the sun sinking over them provided us with a spectacular show of bright yellows and oranges that slowly faded to mellow hues of deep orange and red as we droned on towards Gaborone. It was amazing to watch, and as I sat in my office in the sky observing all this, I reflected on the privilege that pilots have to be able to see things like that. And I felt very happy to be where I was. If the sunsets weren’t enough, the weather also provided a welcome challenge on the flying side. On both days, there was a low overcast layer of clouds over the southeastern part of the country between Francistown and Gaborone (an apparently rare occurrence here), so we had the chance to fly several instrument approaches, with one of them even down to minimums. It was good practice and good fun after a whole lot of sunny, visual flying. One thing that I miss a bit about flying here is flying in instrument weather conditions, so I enjoyed the weekend’s challenges.

Other than that, life has been quite normal. We have had a visitor from Switzerland (Heinz Noettinger) living with us for the past week or so, which has been fun. Heinz is visiting for a month to see Flying Mission and their work here, and we have had a good time getting to know him and having another face around the house. My move to Maun will probably be taking place within the next month or so, although nothing is yet definite, so that is something to look forward to and prepare for. I continue to be excited about the opportunity to live in that smaller village setting (although Maun has grown quite rapidly over the past few years and is a large tourist center now) and to fly in the delta. I will keep you informed as I learn more about developments in that area. For now, it’s bedtime. Peace-

Travis

Khutse Trip

2007-10-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

Since I traded a few off days at various points throughout the last month or so, I had accumulated a bit of off time. So this past weekend, I used up some of those days and took a 6 days off, 3 of which were spent on a short outing to the Khutse Game Reserve with the two short-termers and another Flying Mission fellow, Peter Shaw, and his son Andrew. Khutse is a small park that sort of hangs off the bottom of the Central Kalahari. As a result, it's very Kalahari-ish, which means hot and dry with a bunch of pans and low shrub with the occasional animal or tree. It's a pretty desolate and beautiful landscape, and since there aren't too many animals there due to the lack of water and greenness, the landscape is a big part of the attraction. As well as seeing some of what the Kalahari is like. It's amazing that people managed to live in a place like that without standing water for so many thousands of years. Anyway, it was a good trip with it's share of adventure (try setting up a 10 person tent in the dark in blasting winds and rain). I've put a few pictures up on the gmail site, so enjoy. Gotta run cause my internet time is running out (internet doesn't appear to be working at the hangar too often these days). Peace.

2007-10-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

The sun sets behind an afternoon storm brewing over a water hole, in Khutse Game Reserve.

Pictures

2007-10-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

I posted a few new pics, by the way, in the google album "month 3." More to come.