Beans and Dust Devils

Above is a short video about what the boys and girls have been up to. Life sure is interesting with these guys!

Tivoli, caught in the act of escaping. She is very proud of herself because she managed to reach up and undo the latch above her head. 

They get dirty so fast out here. Soon they will be walking. That should at least save their knees.

Nothing like bananas!

The past two weeks have been very full with MAF standardization. This involved ground courses and flights in order to learn to operate with MAF International procedures.

My last MAF standardization flight took us to a few airfields which we fly into regularly. After crossing the escarpment, which is a plateau dividing very dry land and mountains covered in rainforest, we had a slight diversion to avoid thousands of flamingos which had taken flight over the rainforest next to Lake Manyara. One of those times I wish I had brought my camera!

One of the three airstrips we flew into that day was Matala. See if you can locate it in the google earth image above.

As you can see, the difficulty in getting into this particular airstrip is figuring out exactly where the boundaries of the runway are and where to put the wheels down. In addition, upon arriving, a large dust devil (more than 200 feet wide and over 1,000 feet tall) was passing over the end of the runway. These dust devils are common in some areas and I have seen over a dozen of these dust and sand filled wonders tearing across the parched earth. I have observed some even reach a few thousand feet off the ground.  Definitely did not want to tangle with that. 

And here is the airstrip. It is situated just north of a large school which subsequently had recess. After one aborted takeoff due to two dogs and a man, we tried again and were back in the air for a short hop to Gorimba, an airstrip which serves an area of nomadic hunter gatherers. 

Keep us in your prayers:

• We have been taking the rounds again with being sick. Currently, Jason is running a fever and stuffy nose. He is watching Winnie the Pooh now. He told us he wanted to watch it and then said he could not remember what Pooh's name was...
• As we mentioned in our last post, Jacob has fulfilled all the requirements for license conversion to Tanzania. We are still waiting for this to be approved.