Spotlight on remote communities
Last updated 21 August 2020
Mission Aviation Fellowship: ‘Sharing God’s love through aviation and technology’
Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) serves isolated people in remote communities in 24 countries world-wide, by using aircraft to bring in essentials, medical care, emergency food and Christian hope.
“Our purpose is to deliver practical and spiritual care to people in places of deepest human need. Every four and a half minutes, a MAF plane takes off or lands somewhere in the world. These flights enable crucial work by many aid and development agencies, missions, local churches and other national groups.” (Who we are – MAF Australia, retrieved 17 May 2019, https://maf.org.au/who-we-are/)
Mission Aviation Fellowship provides flight services for 2,000 aid, development, and mission organisations in areas which mountains, jungles, swamps, civil unrest, or even a basic lack of adequate road-infrastructure, make too dangerous or time-consuming to reach by any other means. Basic medical care and evacuations, schools, clean water, emergency aid, outreach with the Good News are some of the areas which rely on the services of MAF.
Previously working with CRMF in PNG, Dan and Shannon Perrett and their daughters now serve with MAF in Mareeba, at their maintenance facility and training centre. Dan has almost completed his training as an Avionics Engineer and will soon be available to assist in other MAF centres, and Shannon works as the MAF Mareeba Finance Officer. KawanaLife have been part of Dan and Shannon’s support team for a number of years.
Pray for Dan and Shannon and their family as they serve with this vital mission. You can follow them on Facebook to get regular updates.
Fuel for Father’s Day
This humble jerrycan carries one of our most precious resources: fuel. That’s why we need your help today.
When the equivalent of one full jerrycan (just $50) gets poured into our aircraft, we are fuelled for around 20 minutes of flying. For isolated communities, it replaces days of travel on foot. These short flights have saved many lives.
With your gift of fuel for Father’s Day you can be a part of this life-saving ministry. https://jerrycan.maf.org.au/
COVID-19 Update:
MAF has been serving isolated communities around the world for 75 years. Our vision is to see isolated people physically and spiritually transformed in Christ’s name and with Covid-19 reaching almost every country in the world, many people are experiencing isolation in a new way.
MAF remains committed to serving isolated communities, but at this time we are focused on ensuring we don’t carry the virus into remote areas. Our teams have remained in their programmes; they are following government advice and working with partners and governments to meet needs where possible. We have seen flight requests reduce and we expect this to continue in the next few weeks. However, we are working to ensure we are ready to fly again when it is safe and possible to do so.
Our staff, like you, are facing the challenges that come with social distancing and self-isolating. Please pray for them as they deal with this. We ask that you also pray for our partners and the people in the countries where we work: many will not have the facilities or financial security to self-isolate or practice social distancing and many health care systems will not be able to cope should an outbreak occur. Pray particularly for the many refugees in camps around the world.
During this very difficult season, MAF has been able to assist other organisations to get critical educational information and supplies to remote and isolated communities who are otherwise cut off by border closures and transport restrictions. You can read some of these stories on their website.
Helping During COVID19 Lockdown – Timor-Leste | Engineering through Covid-19
Featured image 'MAF-8879' by Melody Warford used under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/. Downloaded from Flikr.