At MAF Papua’s bases, all hands are on deck—at the hangar, in the air, at home, and in the community.
The coronavirus has impacted our overseas programs in a variety of ways. In some places, flight requests have dropped off because many of our partners have evacuated back to their passport countries. In other areas, our flights have been restricted to cargo only, except for critical medevacs. This is the case in Papua, Indonesia, where our pilots have been able to deliver food and other supplies to isolated villages, including medicine, COVID-19 test kits, personal protective equipment (PPE), and soap. MAF families here are also finding many ways to help during this time of crisis.
In Nabire, MAF staff and a Wycliffe worker, plus his helper, recently prepared medicine kits at the request of missionaries working in two remote villages. One request was precautionary–there hadn’t been any cases yet. But in another isolated village, a man had trekked in from another area and brought with him a constant dry cough. Now many in this village have symptoms of the virus–the cough, fever, and fatigue – including several members of the missionary team there. MAF had recently flown a regular supply including fever reducers and partial medicine kits for treating symptoms of COVID-19, but the kits were missing chloroquine.
Fortunately, when MAF stopped to deliver the kits to the first village, they were able to pick up the medicine. MAF offered to airdrop the meds to the second village, since only a helicopter can land there. These medicine kits won’t cure COVID-19, but they will help ease the respiratory symptoms associated with it.
Many Hands Helping
In Wamena, some of the MAF women and other wives in the mission community learned there was no protective gear at their local clinic. With donations from their supporters in the US and the Netherlands, the women began a huge push to get 300 masks with filters to the hospitals, 30 face shields (3D printed), and 60 hospital gowns. They also enlisted the help of local tailors to sew 1,600 face masks, which they’ve distributed to their local community and to the villages. And more are on their way!
“The people have been in awe that people far away care enough for them to provide masks. It has been a testament to the Lord and His love!” said MAF’s Joy Bryant.
MAF families at Wamena, Nabire, and Sentani have also been purchasing bars of soap. Then, the pilots are delivering boxes of soap when they land at an interior village. These include an instruction sheet since many isolated Papuans have never used soap before.
The Pieces Come Together
There have been a few requests for serious medevac flights lately, including one for a woman who needed to get from Wamena to Sentani for a major surgery.
As MAF staff were scrambling to make this happen, pilot Joyce Lin was on her way to Danowage. “I ended up diverting to Wamena due to bad weather,” said Joyce.
What Joyce didn’t realize is that she was part of a puzzle that God was working out.
That morning, the Wamena team suddenly received permission for the flight, just as Joyce was unexpectedly landing at Wamena. Now they had the approvals and an airplane that would be headed back to Sentani, where Joyce is based.
The wife and husband packed their bags and were ready to go within 30 minutes! Theirs was the first evacuation out of Wamena since the COVID lockdown.
Please pray for permissions to allow for critical non-COVID medevac flights in this area of Papua. Also pray for those others who have been impacted by this pandemic—from Indonesia to Africa, Haiti, and restricted countries.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be collecting more stories of how MAF is responding in the midst of COVID-19.
Update May 13, 2020: We are deeply saddened to tell you about the loss of our colleague and friend, Joyce Lin, who reported an emergency shortly after taking off from the Sentani airport the morning of May 12. The aircraft descended into Lake Sentani, and Joyce did not survive the accident. Click here for more details, including how you can pray.
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2) Minister Nadiem, please visit children in eastern Indonesia
Nila Tanzil
- Jakarta / Tue, May 12, 2020 / 02:36 pm
We recently learned a policy initiative spearheaded by the minister of education and culture was turned back during the implementation review because it would not reach children without electricity or access to the internet.
It should probably come as no surprise that the creative tech wizard who changed the way people and goods move in Indonesia, generating billions of dollars of valuation and commerce and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs along the way with an app, turned to online technology to address the challenges the education system in Indonesia faces.
We are all the summation of our experiences, and with that in mind, I would like to offer Minister Nadiem Makarim an open invitation to visit Taman Bacaan Pelangi (Rainbow Reading Gardens) libraries on remote islands in eastern Indonesia to see first-hand the challenges that children in outlying areas face in trying to learn.
I believe this experience would greatly benefit the policy-making ideation for this innovative business leader. I continue to have high hopes that his tenure will bring big changes and close the ever-increasing education gap between urban and rural areas of Indonesia.
As founder of Taman Bacaan Pelangi, I lead a team dedicated to improving literacy rates in the remote parts of eastern Indonesia. Over the past decade my team has built 131 children’s libraries across 18 islands and trained nearly 2,000 local teachers, school principals and librarians. My life revolves around remote villages without electricity or access to the internet, where children still jump for joy each time we cut the ribbon and inaugurate a new library at their school giving them immediate access to thousands of colorful books.
And while Taman Bacaan Pelangi gladly embraces new technology to improve literacy rates—our team is pioneering Raspberry Pi projects and contributing to the Literacy Cloud alongside Google—we recognize that things like Zoom calls and Ruangguru are simply unrealistic for millions of Indonesian children.
So when the pandemic caused schools in remote areas to close, Taman Bacaan Pelangi immediately reordered our work and began distributing weekly learning packages to 2,000 students in Flores and West Papua, ensuring that they would not be left behind and keep learning during this pandemic. We are currently looking for partners to expand the program in an effort to reach more children in areas without access to the internet.
COVID-19 has left some 60 million pre-primary to upper secondary Indonesian school children with nowhere to turn. Technology and the internet serve as a solid solution to keep children learning in the midst of COVID-19, but unfortunately, tech is not inclusive.
While the latest figures suggests that there are more 171 million internet users across Indonesia, the same data explain that more remote islands, such as Papua, Sulawesi and Maluku, only have 10 percent of internet penetration and only 5 percent of the total population of Nusa Tenggara has access to the internet.
This pandemic will force children who live in remote areas to fall further behind. It will turn the education quality between the urban and rural areas from a gap to a chasm. Against this backdrop, the Research Triangle Institute conducted widescale testing in 2014. The results indicated that children in Nusa Tenggara, Papua and Maluku were found to have the lowest reading skills in the country. Children in those areas could only read 30 words per minute, as compared to children in Java and Bali who could read 60 words per minute. These numbers are simply staggering.
I have been to countless villages without electricity or a phone signal, let alone the internet. I know a village, an hour away from Labuan Bajo, where children have never even seen a crayon before. I remember, last year, sleeping in the thatched-roof house of a fisherman in East Sumba, an hour away from Waingapu, with only a candle to keep me company at night. I also remember having to tie a mobile phone on a wooden fence in a schoolyard to find a phone signal and contact the head of the Central Sumba Education Agency as we waited for him to inaugurate our new library.
We forget that Jakarta is a far cry from the rest of the country. And while we enjoy Wi-Fi and flat whites here in the capital city, most children in remote villages study by the light of an oil lantern. In the village of Welak, West Manggarai, Flores, just two hours away from Labuan Bajo, families rely on a generator for electricity and every household is only allowed to have two light bulbs. So forget learning educational programs on public broadcaster TVRI, as not everyone can afford it, as well as high-speed broadband and a laptop or pricey mobile phone to go with it.
I realize that travel is an issue at the moment, but policymakers who aim to build fit-for-purpose interventions, visiting the people they seek to assist is an investment of time and resources that will reap dividends in better results and outcomes for years to come.
Education matters now more than ever. When schools close, children and youth are deprived of opportunities for growth and development. No child should be left behind. Innovations spearheaded by the Ministry of Education should not be solely high-tech, but also low-tech, and even no-tech, to ensure every child keeps learning at the time of this global pandemic.
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Founder of Taman Bacaan Pelangi (Rainbow Reading Gardens)
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are
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3) The War Next Door The War Next Door
Just north of Australia a secret war is being fought. West Papuan independence fighters and Indonesian security forces are involved in a protracted and bloody battle over the issue of Papuan independence.
Read the Indonesian Government's response to our story here.
29mins 54secs Tue 12 May 2020, 7:50pm
Full episiodes at
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https://en.antaranews.com/news/148328/sar-team-finds-american-pilots-body-in-lake-sentani-papua
4) SAR team finds American pilot''s body in Lake Sentani, Papua
16 hours ago
Jayapura, Papua (ANTARA) - The body of US national Joice Lin, pilot of an MAF airplane that crashed into Lake Sentani, Papua Province, Tuesday morning, was found in the lake, Norbert Tunyanan, Indonesia's Transport Safety Committee (KNKT) representative, stated.
"I have received a report stating that the SAR team found the body of the pilot of the MAF aircraft, with registration PK-MEC, after diving into Lake Sentani," Tunyanan remarked on Tuesday.
The evacuation team found the body at a depth of 13 meters and still inside the plane's cockpit.
Prior to the crash, Pilot Joice Lin called for help. "May day ... may day" call was clearly audible to other pilots aboard other aircraft at radio frequency 119, 1, he revealed.
An AMA pilot on another aircraft, with registration PK-RCE, took pictures of the accident, Tunyanan revealed.
MAF's PK-MEC aircraft crashed at around 6:26 a.m. local time on Tuesday after departing from Sentani to Mamit, Tolikara District, Papua Province.
The accident took place two minutes after take-off.
Related news: Mamit-bound MAF Aircraft crashes into Lake Sentani, Papua
Related news: Plane with broken wheel overshoots runway at Papua's Mulia Airport EDITED BY INE
"I have received a report stating that the SAR team found the body of the pilot of the MAF aircraft, with registration PK-MEC, after diving into Lake Sentani," Tunyanan remarked on Tuesday.
The evacuation team found the body at a depth of 13 meters and still inside the plane's cockpit.
Prior to the crash, Pilot Joice Lin called for help. "May day ... may day" call was clearly audible to other pilots aboard other aircraft at radio frequency 119, 1, he revealed.
An AMA pilot on another aircraft, with registration PK-RCE, took pictures of the accident, Tunyanan revealed.
MAF's PK-MEC aircraft crashed at around 6:26 a.m. local time on Tuesday after departing from Sentani to Mamit, Tolikara District, Papua Province.
The accident took place two minutes after take-off.
Related news: Mamit-bound MAF Aircraft crashes into Lake Sentani, Papua
Related news: Plane with broken wheel overshoots runway at Papua's Mulia Airport EDITED BY INE
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