Colonial Comparison

The year was 1498. The Portuguese explorer, Vasco da Gama, had just anchored his caravella sailing ship in the sheltered waters of the inlet and was making his way in the longboat with a landing party to a rocky island that dominated the bay. Soon, he would meet the sultan of the island, a successful Arab trader by the name of Mussa Al Bique. At the moment they would meet, a new chapter of history would begin—one that would be dominated by Portuguese colonial presence in southeast Africa for several hundred years. Vasco da Gama would initiate that era by naming the island after his host, a name that Portugal would later call its new colony: Mozambique.

Dave Wunsch and I interview US and Brazilian missionaries

For the past several days, Dave Wunsch, VP Operations, and I have been here in the northern part of Mozambique continuing our job of helping MAF take a strategic look at its flight programs. Thanks to the hospitality of three dedicated MAF staff families based in the city of Nampula, we’re enjoying good fellowship, great meals and some amazing Indiana Jones-type Land Rover rides around town on roads that would belong better on a dirt-bike racing track. Our days have been filled with back-to-back interviews conducted with mission and national church leaders. As we ask questions and take copious notes, an interesting picture of this country is emerging.

Having just completed similar interviews in Angola, the other former Portuguese colony of southern Africa, I really expected to find similar conditions in Mozambique.  I couldn't have been more mistaken. Differences in tribal groups, geography and colonial history seem to have produced significant differences in how these two countries function today. Here are just two examples:

·         Because Angolans are deeply grateful for the national peace they've enjoyed since the end

of their civil war ten years ago, there is a unified sense of readiness to embrace progress in economy, technology and even in church collaboration. In contrast, Mozambicans seem stuck in a past paradigm of tribalism that is causing everything from business to church relations to be fragmented and frozen in tradition         .

·         In Angola, we were impressed with the maturity of national church leaders who have not only prioritized the importance of graduate level seminary education but are also actively engaged in church-planting outreach efforts among the remaining unreached people groups of their country. In Mozambique, some churches have produced prolific daughter missions in nearby villages, but we found none that were committed to a true missionary effort among the yet untouched tribal groups along the coast or in the far northwest. Additionally, we were told there were only two pastors who had completed a bachelor-level seminary degree in the entire northern region of the country.

Three little friends from a local orphanage

One thing that both countries share, however, is an incredibly strong influence of animism in their current cultures. It was interesting to find Angolan church leaders who really believed that one particular tribe’s witchcraft empowered them to swim underwater for over an hour without surfacing and ride crocodiles like horses. In Mozambique the power of fetish traditions and ancestor worship is not unlike that of Muslim cultures that prohibit family members from becoming a Christian and may even disown them if they do.

Interviewing one of the two church leaders in Nampula
who have graduated from seminary

 It will be an interesting challenge to see how MAF can best serve the mission and church community here in northern Mozambique. I hope by the time we wrap up this trip, we will have some new and creative ideas about how to answer that question.

Diesel Power!

One of the most impressive parts of my time visiting the MAF program in Angola was to personally experience the impact of two Cessna 182 aircraft that were newly equipped with diesel engines. Having been added to the fleet last April, these two planes are already changing the way the program is able to serve churches and missions in this country. 

Up until now, the main workhorse of the program was a Cessna 208 Caravan aircraft. This is a ten-passenger airplane that uses a jet-powered turbo-prop engine. Although it is still an ideal plane to transport large loads in the African bush and on rough airstrips for long, four-to-five hour legs, it tends to be a bit too pricey for the mission/church community to afford on a regular basis, especially if they only need to haul one or two people. Other smaller piston-engined planes do not work well either because the cost of the avigas has been $15 per gallon.

Unusual front cowling on the the C-182 

Enter the diesel-powered C-182! After years of testing, this new plane/engine combination could mark the beginning of new revolution in light aircraft design. Able to use the same jet-fuel as the Caravan (only $5.00 per gallon or less) These smaller planes offer both the perfect size and cost for the typical church or mission need in southern Angola.

Note the yellow lightning-strikes on our flight course!

The MAF pilots wanted to show us this point in action, so four of us headed out on a 55 minute flight from Lubango to the Caluquembe Hospital up north. The new plane not only had a super-simple computerized throttle control system, but were also equipped with the latest “glass-cockpit” avionics.  I was particularly impressed to track the lighting strikes from a huge storm along our path as we made our way home again!

Happy users of the new diesel-powered C-182

Because of the availability of these planes, MAF Angola is now considering offering new types of “round-robin” field trips where a pilot could head out for a three or four day trip with a three-man medical team or discipleship-training group participating in their ministry during the overnights. As we talked about this to local ministry leaders, it was fun to see how new interest in MAF service was sparked by this possibility.

All MAF pilots are still hoping a diesel solution will become available for the larger, six-seat Cessna 206, and apparently, such an engine is actually on the way. But in the meantime, these new diesel-powered C-182’s certainly can play a key role in offering affordable mission aviation service in certain key places of the world—like southern Angola.

Angola Impressions

Question: What is UIEA, IESA, IECA, AEA, CICA, ICCA and CMEL?

Answer: They’re all acronyms for church and ministry organizations that I had a chance to interview during the past few days here in Angola.

 It’s all part of my assignment to help the Mission Aviation Fellowship program do some strategic planning for the next few years. What a privilege it has been to meet these national Christian leaders and hear their stories of what God is doing here in the fourth largest country of Africa.

I now have another big map of Angola filled with scribbles and notes indicating just what is happening where.  It’s hard to encapsulate all of it, but here are some of my main observations and impressions from what I've heard:

·         Angolan people are still deeply impacted by the thirty years of civil war that ended only a decade ago. Every single person is grateful for the peace that now exists across the country and see this time of peace as an opportunity for new growth—economically and spiritually.

·         Two-thirds of Angola is today quite accessible by road. Although transportation on those roads is not always easy and sometimes demands a Land Cruiser or Toyota HiLux, it still is possible for people, including pastors and doctors, to get to many of the towns and villages of this country. This accessibility is actually quite remarkable compared to so many other under-developed African countries.

·         The remaining third of Angola is really remote. In the south and east, the land area is vast, desolate and inhabited by the most unreached people groups in the nation. These groups, like the clans of the African Bushmen, are still living in some of the most primitive and nomadic circumstances of any in the world.

·         The good news is that Evangelical churches are definitely growing and planting new churches throughout the entire country. The official number of church members has quadrupled since the end of the war.

·         The bad news is that these churches are not demonstrating much collaboration or partnership but instead seem to be building their own little kingdoms with their own Bible institutes and own medical work.

·         New life is being breathed into the MAF flight program with new opportunities to serve such things as remote medical work, Bible translation and Theological Education by Extension (TEE) using two new Cessna 182 aircraft that use a new type of diesel engine. (More on this in my next blog.)

These are only six bullet points out of 35 that I have in my notebook! Now my job is to synthesize all this good information down into some helpful conclusions and recommendations for the pilots and staff of the MAF Angola flight program.

Rusting Doors and Secret Missions

For more than thirty years, Angola was caught in a devastating civil war. It finally came to an end in 2002 when government forces succeeded in killing one single person—Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the rebel movement called UNITA. Within hours of that event, arms were laid down and a new era of peace began.

During this trip of mine to Angola, I’m learning how much influence Savimbi held over the people of this country. Not only did his rebel followers believe he had special powers, but even the opposing government troops were deathly afraid of what he might do to them with his witchcraft ability.

The fear of Savimbi's witchcraft is still demonstrated today by a most unusual memorial set up in the far southeast corner of the country.

It’s the remains of a metal door propped up against a tree—the very tree under which he was killed. In order to prove the famous rebel leader was no longer alive, his body was laid out on a metal door ripped off of a nearby house and paraded around for all to see. So powerful was the news of his death that the entire UNITA rebel force dissolved almost immediately. But, then, people, including the government authorities, began to fear that the powerful witchcraft associated with Savimbi would linger around him infecting even the door his body laid on. Hoping to appease evil spirits, they quickly returned it to the tree where he was killed. To this day, folks give it wide berth as its rusting remains rests up against the tree trunk.

When MAF Canada first got started in Angola back in the late 1980s, there was a major concern that its planes might become targets of a rebel rocket attack by Savimbi’s UNITA militia. Shoulder-fired Stinger missiles had already brought down more than one Soviet cargo plane supplying communist government forces. MAF sent telex messages to a blind address somewhere in Europe before each flight hoping that UNITA contacts would receive the information and inform rebels on the ground that MAF was embarking on another humanitarian and non-political flight. No response was ever received and MAF never had any certainty its flights were being recognized as peaceful.

So I was asked to conduct a secret mission. While on a furlough in the US in 1990, I was asked to attend a prayer breakfast in Washington DC hosted by an ultra-conservative, anti-communist group.  The guest of honor? Savimbi himself! Before the event began, I was ushered into a back room and given five minutes of personal time with the infamous warrior. Using my best childhood Portuguese, I was able to confirm that the MAF telex messages were indeed being received. On top of that, Savimbi told me he knew all about the MAF plane and the service it was offering to the mission hospitals. “You have nothing to worry about from us,” he said, “We know MAF is doing a good job for our people.”

Because of the political sensitivities of that time, I could not share with anyone I had made this secret mission and had contact with Sivimbi...until now!

Even after ten years since Savimbi’s death, people still talk about the war as if it happened just yesterday. Everyone is incredibly grateful for the season of peace Angola now enjoys. It’s also amazing to see the impact MAF flight service has had for all these years. Over the next few days, I’ll be interviewing key church leaders to find out how that service should continue on into the future. 

Stay tuned!

Memories and Maps

I watch the Russian Antanov cargo plane take off from the long runway and immediately bank into a sharp left-hand climbing turn. As it continues to circle upwards right over the center of the airfield, it begins dropping blinding magnesium flares out of each wingtip, a counter-measure to ward off the success of a shoulder-mounted Stinger missile launched from rebel fighter hiding in the nearby tall grass. The sight was both exhilarating and sobering to me, knowing that a similar plane had been brought down this way just weeks before in this same part of Africa.

That was twenty-five years ago.

Today, I landed at that very same airport here in Lubango, Angola after a forty-hour marathon trip from my home in Spokane, WA. The sight of the Soviet-era MiG fighters hiding in their bunkers next to the runway brought back lots of memories of my first visit here back in 1988. It was smack in the middle of the civil war that devastated this former Portuguese colony for over thirty years. And, it was the very time that MAF-Canada had asked me to help them begin a brand new flight program with a Cessna Caravan aircraft that was designed to support several mission hospitals. During all these intervening years, this program has been faithfully serving the people, hospitals and churches of Angola.

So, I count it a real privilege to be invited back here again to once again help MAF-Canada conduct an assessment of their flight program.  This time, I’m accompanied by Dave Wunsch, VP of Operations for MAF-USA who will also be lending his hand in this review. Together, we truly hope to be used by God as an encouragement to the team of expat and national staff who make this MAF program a reality. In addition, I’m looking forward to interviewing as many key national ministry leaders as possible to learn just how God is moving them to reach this country for Christ. Hopefully, any final advice and counsel that might result from our visit will help enhance the level of collaboration and partnership between MAF and the Angolan church.

As I’m handed a glass of water to quench my thirst after my long trip, another surprising ghost from the past materializes. Gary Goertzen, current MAF program manager spreads out a map of the country with all sorts of hand markings on it. I take a closer look and realize the markings are my own! This was the very same map I used years ago to catalog key mission information all across the country! No other document exists anywhere quite like this one! I learn from Gary that it is still being used today for strategic planning purposes.

Hopefully, before I depart seven days from now, I’ll be able to leave the MAF team another valuable document like this one that will serve them in creating an even more effective aviation ministry for this huge country.