stories

Recently Sudan tumbled headlong into chaos. Violence and political instability escalated rapidly, driving organizations to evacuate their people. Compelled by the love of neighbor and the sake of the gospel, these are people who have chosen to go to a place that is already quite difficult, even without a violent civil war erupting overnight.

“Where can my guys get discipled or mentored?” The question, posed by my friend in the arid northern Kenya county of Marsabit, resonated with me. As an aviation ministry, we often feel like we have one foot planted in the bustling, busy, and blooming city of Nairobi. Our other foot is in the heat, dust, and scarcity of northern or eastern Kenya, and beyond.

Sunlight slowly spills over the horizon. My fingers brush over this Cessna U206F’s dented aluminum, the signs of many years of affliction from gravel runways that the plastic anti-abrasion tape cannot hide. This plane, 5Y-SIL, was the oldest 206 in AIM AIR’s fleet. After one more flight to haul 400 kilograms of supplies up to the Boma plateau in South Sudan, she would move down to Nairobi for inspection.

I’ve filled the snug airplane cabin with mothers holding babies on their laps, mountain bikes, medicine boxes, or even a V6 boat engine before. For every flight, each item is weighed to ensure my total load is within the weight limit of the airplane – usually around half a ton of cargo and people. Many times the cargo weighs more than expected, and some items have to be removed from the airplane to await a future flight. Fortunately, this was not the case today. Flowers and ice cream weighed very little. The challenge was carefully storing and loading them so they arrived in excellent condition.

Boots on the sand, I pulled my cell phone out of its pocket. I called the chief pilot to let her know everything was OK. Then I called Breanna. "Just wanted to let you know we've had an issue with the airplane here in northern Kenya. Everyone's OK, but we probably...

Early on Monday morning I headed to the airport with more questions than answers. Would South Sudan allow me to enter their airspace since they started restricting international flights the previous Friday? Would the UN-controlled airstrip at Doro be open for me to pull out the SIM team? Would any of the passengers have symptoms?

The Ingessana people are, in the words of Ethiopian missionary Getachew Tsegye, a “hard-core Muslim” tribe – some of whom were even trained by Osama bin Laden as members of Al Qaeda. There was a group of Ingessana living in the refugee camps around Doro, South Sudan when an AIM AIR flight brought Getachew and his fellow Ethiopian evangelists to work among the Sudanese refugees for the first time in 2012.