Dec 14th

Well, last week started my official in-country flight training time. That means that I have all my licenses and permissions to fly in Ecuador and can start getting "checked out" in the Ecuadorian air space and in the airstrips that we land in.

I fly with an MAF instructor, but pretty much do all the work of preparation, flying, talking on the radio and customer interaction. He still helps me when I run into something new or unexpected, but more and more I am on my own.

Today I started out expecting to only do one flight that lasted about an hour to a community near the eastern border with Peru called Wirima. The purpose was to take gasoline into the community to support a team that went in yesterday. I´m not sure exactly what the team was doing, but they were members of the Sápara nation. The government of Ecuador, in its infinite wisdom, decided two weeks ago to disallow the mixing of flammable materials on passenger flights. That means that people flying into jungle communities can´t take gas with them! It is very unfair and has no basis on safety, but we must comply. So we flew the work team in yesterday and their fuel in today. That means that for the 40 gallons of fuel that cost about $80.00 in Shell, ended up costing them about $700 by the time it was flown into them.

On the way back, we got a call that an 11 year old boy had been bitten by a snake and needed to be flown out. We had planned a stop in that community (Torimbo) anyway to pick up a school teacher to take out to Shell, so it worked well.

Some of the strips we fly into have limitations on how much weight we can take off with because they are so short and there are tall trees or mountains on the departure path. This was one of them, so in order to get everyone out, we had to take the teacher and one other passenger from Wiririma to a community about 5 min away with a longer strip, go back to Torimbo to pick up the child and his dad, then fly to the other strip to pick up the original passengers, THEN we could make it back to Shell with all of them.

I am very excited to be doing this and being able to help the people in who live in the jungle of Ecuador in this way. I am sure to learn a few phrases in the local language to be able to greet the people in their language as well. Today was all Sápara communties, but they speak the jungle dialect of Quichua. So I learned how to say "good afternoon" in Quichua: Ali chisha. I´m sure that is not how it is spelled, but I write it how I hear it and they seemed to understand me!

We´ll see what I get to do tomorrow!