Tree Hugging Tank and a House Under Construction, Again.

Hello everybody, Steve here.

          The past few days have been busy. Wednesday was a rainy morning , and my help to continue removing the wings off the T182 would not be available till the afternoon so figured I would work on a post of what happened this week.
         Last Friday I spent some time figuring out if I could send the oxygen tank from the T182 with Gabriel Jones (a pilot volunteering in Guayaramerin) in his checked luggage. I ended up calling the TSA and they told me to take the valve off the tank so they could visually inspect inside the tank, and they would allow it to be carried on an airline flight.

The first attempt to remove the valve off the tank with Gabriel. The tree was too small in diameter, so the tank spun around the trunk of the tree. Richard(the TV station director) had just pulled up in his car and thought we had come up with a new way to remove trees, by launching them.

The next attempt to remove the valve included wrapping the tank in rubber inner tubes, getting bigger ratchet straps, and strapping the tank in the fork of a tree so that it could not spin around the tree trunk.

Sabbath we went with Richard (the TV station director playing the trumpet) to a church and Helen played her violin with them. Kody, a volunteer from Guayaramerin played the piano.

     Sunday Gabriel and I went and we started getting the T182 ready to have its wings removed so that we can transport the plane out to our property. While Gabriel and I were at the airport working on the plane the Bolivian builder that we had hired before to stucco/plaster came to the house asking Helen if we had work to be done. We have hired him to stucco the rest of the house, and we are thinking of having him lay the tile on the floor. Those are two time consuming jobs. That way he can work on the house, and I can work on the planes.
       So Monday morning we cleared out one bedroom and I went and got some materials for the stucco work.

The cleared out room.

                         

Cement with all the stuff from the cleaned out bedroom.

A pile of sand in the driveway.

        Monday afternoon I ended up talking with DJ Knott and Jeff Sutton over Skype about maintenance to get the planes here flying again. During that time Helen was getting tired of acting like a pregnant lady and started digging some holes in the ground to plant some fruit trees that were given to us. So Tuesday morning she went to the doctor because she was cramping. The baby is ok, but the cervix is thinning, so the doctor ordered Helen on bed rest for a few days till the next check up. I spent the rest of the day doing some parts/materials inventory.

Helen’s side of the bed.

   So I'm going to go dig some holes so that I take that temptation away from Helen.
God bless you all,
Steve

Assembly and Rigging

Helen everybody,
Steve here.
Here are a few pictures of what I did today. Reassembly of the plane that we moved. Praise the Lord everything went well. Thanks to Kody for the help getting the wings back on.

Thank you to Lincoln and Monica for putting up with the wings in their living room for two nights.

                                       

We were red-neck shade tree mechanics. The leaves are still coming back on some of the trees, so the sun gave us the red-neck.

At least the wing gave us shade when we were under it.

This is the view of the neighbors land next to the runway. 90 degrees to the right of this direction is a neighborhood on the other side of the runway.

Now it really looks like a pilot's house.

More Airplane Moving

Hello everybody,
Steve here.

         We moved the Cessna 182 today to the runway at the mission property today. Praise the lord we were able to move the plane without damaging the plane. When the plane was going down the road on the back of the truck, and kids saw it they would run along the side of the road not watching where they were running. At times it was a little hair raising moving the plane amongst the Bolivian traffic. Here are a few pictures.

                 

I think that was the softest landing this plane has seen on grass.

Moving Airplanes.

Hello everyone, Steven here.
         In November of 2010 three airplanes that had been operating with the mission aviation project in Bolivia were grounded due to customs paperwork. In the mean time while these planes were grounded we were operating some other planes on international flight permissions in Bolivia. This meant that every 30 days we had to make a two and a half hour flight to Brazil if we had no mission flights to do in the neighbouring countries.
        The short version of the long story about the customs papers is that customs duties needed to be paid on the planes in order to get the customs papers. The funding was hung up for a long time, and then after customs duties were paid the customs papers were hung up a long time by customs brokers not doing their job. But praise the Lord, last week the customs papers came through, and now we can do something with these planes!
        These planes are currently located at the South American Missions hangar at an airstrip in Santa Cruz named KM7. The airstrip is at kilo-meter 7 on the old highway that goes to Cochabamba from Santa Cruz. Yesterday we began preparing the plane to remove the wings, and today we removed the wings from a plane getting ready to truck the plane to our airstrip for some repairs after being grounded for so long. Here are some pictures.

Kody a volunteer from the school in Guyararmerin helped Herman and I take the wings off.

Add caption

The first wing off.

This looks like a skydiving plane. video planes collide in terrifying skydiving accident caught on tape

Now it is ready to move onto a truck.

Blessings in the Tomato Patch and Flower Garden

Hello there, Steve here. I just want to share a few pictures of tokens of God's blessings.

Steve

We picked these tomatoes yesterday evening.

Helen planted a flower garden behind the house, and she planted a few small round cactus by the back door thinking that the cactus may have a few small flowers. But the small ordinary looking cactus has a flower larger than the cactus.

The cactus bloomed last night and I took a picture of the flower. The shoot that the flower blooms on takes a few days to grow. Then the flower blooms at night and is open in the morning and is gone by noon.

Some of Our Blessings

One of the biggest blessings God has given us is our garden. We struggled so much last year and barely harvested anything, but we learned a lot through our failures and tried again this year. It was kind of  a step out in faith planting this year because we planted the week before leaving to Canada for two and a half months. We weren't sure if anything would result of it, but we prayed, set up a watering system we hoped would work, hired a boy to water and weed, and left. By God's mercy, most everything grew and the missionaries here on campus were able to eat quite a bit from the garden while we were gone. It has continued to produce. Some things are ending and maturing now, but there has been such an abundance compared to previous attempts.We are very grateful.

Tomatoes and peppers from the garden. We are picking the tomatoes a little green because
of the worms. They are quickly eaten if left too long. 

Tomato plant.

Ripening tomatoes. We have had all we can eat and enough to share with the
other families.

Cherry Tomatoes

Spicy Peppers

Kale in amongst marigold flowers and squash vine.

Swiss Chard.... yummy greens

Some of the plants are finishing and going to seed.
The white flowers are the parsley blooming.

Some of the herbs.... with flowers, and lemon grass around the tree.
The lemon grass is a grass that smells and tastes similar to lemon.
We boil it and make a nice tea with it.

In the carrot patch

Some of the veggies

The squash vine decided to take over the yard!!!

One of the flowers that bring me much joy!

     The papaya are not doing so well. The monkeys really did a number on them and they need more rain to thrive. We have more little ones coming, so hopefully we will get some one day. 

      This is just a peak into the garden. It is where a lot of my time ends up going. It is worth it though because we don't have to buy too much from the market and our garden is organic.

       We are just so thankful for all that God has done to protect and bless our efforts. 

Until the next post... God Bless             

                            Helen

                     

The Resurrection of Our Blog

Hello everyone,
Steven here.

   Our blog has been very dead since July 2012. I'm sorry for the silence, but the internet became unusable here. I will let the pictures tell the story.

Look at the upload and download speed. A 56k modem would have been much faster if it worked reliably. In this screen shot you can see that the internet worked slowly for a little bit, and then stopped working.

The internet worked slowly and intermittently at our house in the early morning hours. But that is the time when we need to have devotions and get ready and out the door to do things. Facebook would not even open because it used too much internet, but Gmail would slowly open in the basic HTML mode, when the internet worked. We were subscribing to an internet service that provided 300MB a day, but we never came close to using half that amount of internet.

So how do you solve that problem?

Climb a tree.

And put an antenna in the tree for a signal booster.

And this is the result.

You can see when I started uploading the pictures for this blog post. This was done at the time of day when the internet is the slowest.

And a speed test at the time of day when the internet is the slowest.

Speed test.

We are happy with the results of the signal booster. It has sped the internet up at our house, and we waste a lot less time waiting on slow and intermittent internet. Now that we can communicate, we plan to update little bit by little bit on the main events that have happened during the time that we were out of communication.
Steven