MAF Youth Mag // Issue 25

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WIN A MOVIE KIT! HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS JUNGLE RESCUE THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF STORYTELLING!

A billion people’s sight could be saved Imagine a world with no colour, fuzzy, shadowed outlines or complete darkness.

No independence. Limited access to school resources. A bleak future looming ahead of you…

Globally, at least 2.2 billion people have some form of vision impairment.

According to the World Health

one billion of these cases, vision impairment could have been prevented or has yet to be addressed.

Organisation, in at least

Young children with early onset severe vision impairment can experience delayed motor skills, along with difficulties concerning language, emotional, social and cognitive development – with lifelong consequences.

Teenagers with vision impairment can also experience lower levels of educational achievement, which greatly impacts their future job prospects.

For adults, vision impairment affects their quality of life, with many suffering higher rates of depression and anxiety, social isolation, difficulty walking and a greater risk of accidents and injuries.

Almost half of all blindness in children is actually avoidable! But only if they are

given access to eye doctors, opticians, glasses, and medical equipment. Sadly, most developing countries have little to no access to hospitals and healthcare, let alone eye surgeons.

MAF partners with a number of organisations that offer the medical support needed to help prevent loss of vision. These amazing eye experts need MAF to help them reach isolated communities without any access to medical support.

Madagascar has the second highest number of people suffering from cataracts in the world. Without MAF’s help in making the eye clinics more accessible, some patients would have to walk three or more days to reach a hospital.

You can imagine the difference it would make in your own life if your sight was restored during childhood, rather than as an adult, thanks to MAF’s partners offering young people the life-changing opportunity to see.

Thanks to MAF, eye teams make regular trips to perform cataract surgery

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MAF Pilot Ian Purdey with the box of glass eyes

Mystery box of cargo – more than meets the eye(balls)!

In November 2020, MAF Madagascar Pilot Ian Purdey carried out a medical safari flight, carrying some unusual cargo.

‘We had multiple passengers, including a health team and lots of cargo during the day. A representative from the hospital gave us a small box to pass on to a doctor in Mananara. You can imagine our surprise when we opened it to find several

glass eyes staring back at us!

A prosthetic glass eyebal l – part of th e strange ca rgo MAF sometim es transport s

(We tried to think up some jokes about flying eyeballs, but quickly realised they could not be cornea…)

rows of

‘There was a patient in Mananara who needed one, although we never found out whether it was for a new injury, or an old prosthesis that needed replacing.

‘As an MAF pilot you get to fly interesting cargo. I’ve seen the usual items go into our aircraft, along with loads of excess baggage: animals including cats, dogs, chickens and pigs; water tanks; windows; a church bell; a rocking horse – even a quad bike. But, as far as odd loads go, I think the eyes have it!’

The journey from Mandritsara to Mananara is a short one by air but takes about four days overland, so it was good to be able to get the cargo swiftly and safely to its destination. Although a glass eye may not seem like a piece of urgent life-saving equipment, there’s no doubt that it can have a profound and long-lasting impact on the person who needs it.

‘While this unique cargo was merely unusual for us, I hope that it was life-changing for the person receiving the eye.’

Ian concludes by saying, ‘Although a glass eye won’t restore sight, my prayer is that it will make life that bit more manageable for the recipient, bringing greater acceptance in the person’s community and an increased quality of life.’

As well as flying glass eyes for the doctors and surgeons who set up eye clinics in remote communities around the world,

MAF

has also been known to fly human eyeballs which have been used in surgery to save people’s sight!

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Break a leg! …takes on an all too literal leg shattering meaning when Hollywood actor and activist Ashley Judd was flown to safety by MAF after suffering a severe leg injury during a wildlife research trip in the DRC. MAF flies Ashley Judd to the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) several times a year. She accompanies a team from America’s Harvard University which studies endangered bonobos – great apes located deep within the DRC’s jungle.

On 16 January 2021, MAF flew Ashley and the team from the capital Kinshasa to Djolu in the north, with plans to retrieve them three weeks later.

While walking in the jungle, Ashley’s plans were dramatically cut short when she tripped over a fallen tree and badly injured her leg.

Unable to walk, she was carried for hours in a makeshift stretcher, followed by a harrowing six-hour motorcycle ride, before finally being medevacked by MAF back to the capital on 5 February.

‘I had to physically hold the top part of my shattered shin bone together for six hours on the motorbike.’

Ashley Judd, actor and activist

With MAF Pilot Jonathan de Jongh, the 600-mile flight took around 3 hours. Ashley’s leg was stabilised at a hospital in Kinshasa and again in South Africa before she had to take a further 4 flights (another 22 hours) to reach the USA, where she had an 8-hour operation.

Unknown to Ashley, she had broken her leg in four places and suffered nerve damage.

In an interview with The New York Times journalist, Nicholas Kristof, she describes her ordeal from her hospital bed in South Africa: ‘I was doing what I always do – up at 4.30 in the morning with two of our world class trackers, walking in the dark. My headlamp was not quite working properly. I can walk in partial light, but accidents happen. There was a fallen tree on the path, which I didn’t see and I had a very powerful stride going and I just fell over this tree.’

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In the absence of strong painkillers, Ashley was forced to bite down on a stick to control the excruciating pain: ‘I knew my leg was breaking. What came next was an incredibly harrowing 55 hours. It started with five hours lying on the floor with one of our trackers, with his leg under my badly misshapen leg,

howling like a wild animal.’

biting a stick,

Bravely transported by hammock and motorbike Ashley’s other tracker, Maliko, ran back to wake up Martin Surbeck, who heads up the Kokolopori Bonobo Research Project camp. Five hours later, another man, Papa Jean, found them and reset Ashley’s leg: ‘Papa Jean puts his hands on me to reset my bones.

I’m going into shock, I’m passing out, the pain is really bad, my teeth are chattering, I’m in a cold sweat, I think I’m going to vomit.

‘Then it’s an hour and a half in the hammock being carried out of the rainforest by my Congolese brothers who are barefoot, up and over hills, through the river, and then we’re finally back at camp.

‘Once I get to camp, there’s another hour and a half through the rainforest in the hammock with all my brothers hoisting that thing on their shoulders, taking turns, encouraging me. Then comes the motorbike ride. It took courage for someone to ride with me because they had to physically hold me up.

One man driving and another sitting behind me.’

Following Ashley’s six-hour gruelling bike ride, she spent the night in a hut in Djolu where MAF met her and flew her to Kinshasa. She spent 24 hours in DRC’s capital before completing the next leg (no pun intended!) of her journey to South Africa, where she had a blood transfusion in Intensive Care.

e bridges

Ashley is carried across four slippery, fragil

Djolu

KENYA Lake

GABON

Victoria

Kinshasa

D E M O C R A T I C R E P U B L I C O F C O N G O

ANGOLA

TANZANIA

ZAMBIA

100 miles

In pain, but privileged Despite her agony, Ashley remembers how privileged she is: ‘We had the money to pay someone to drive us to Djolu. For a Congolese person, this would have been the end of their options. They would have got as far as the ancestral villages in the bonobos’ range and that would have been it.

It would have been the end of their leg and probably their life.’

Ashley has faced the bleak reality of what it takes to access urgent medical care from deep within the world’s second largest tropical rainforest. But for the Congolese, severely inadequate healthcare is a daily reality.

Ashley has been using her platform to shine a light on the difficulty Congolese women face, and is particularly passionate about maternal health. In the DRC, according to the UN:

1 in every 24 women dies in childbirth 258 babies die every day before they are 1 month old Only 6% of newborns in rural areas receive postnatal care within 2 days of being born.

MAF continues to work with partners across the DRC to alleviate suffering and support the most isolated communities.

Bonobos

ree-hour MAF’s th flight to medevac shasa Kin

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COUNTRY INDONESIA CAPITAL JAKARTA MAF PROGRAMME BEGAN 1952 Known for its mountains and volcanoes, the world's largest lizard — the komodo dragon and 87% of the population practice Islam

Please pray for the safety of our pilots and their families as they fly in and out of the challenging mountainous regions.

JAKARTA

Can you change the world with Love to explore new cultures? a story?

Enjoy capturing stories, photos and videos?

MAF Communications Officer Jill Vine lives in Uganda with her husband Greg, an MAF pilot. They have three teenage girls

Curious about people’s lives?

This might be the job for you…

What does your role involve?

Jill and Greg, wit hd Esther, Ariela and aughters Zoe Where were you born?

I was born in Brisbane, Australia, and I stayed there until I was 20. I worked, saved up, and deferred studies so I could travel. I ended up working for a blind lady in London, and continued travelling and exploring Europe.

I then went to Israel for an eight-day tour and encountered God in such a powerful way that I ended up staying there almost three years! I got a job as an au pair while studying Hebrew, and worked with immigrants from Ethiopia and Russia.

I met Greg on a bus in Jerusalem, and we became great friends. That’s how I ended up working for MAF, because Greg wanted to be a pilot.

I think I always had a longing to be a missionary, and always had a real passion for the poor, and that’s been a real driving force for me.

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It’s a lot of fun getting a closer view of what MAF is involved in – it’s such a huge network of countries, staff and partners! The pilots are often the only ones who get to see what’s really going on.

They sometimes get to camp out with the partners they fly between flights, or spend a few days with them on medical safari flights.

That isn’t as easy for a pilot to do in Uganda, but it’s really important that someone can communicate the fascinating and life-saving work that MAF partners are doing.

That’s where I come in, and I’ve been doing this job for 15 years now! We started off in Chad for four years, and have now been in Uganda for eleven.

The best part of my role is flying with our partner organisations, interviewing them and visiting their projects.

Meeting the people who are helped by the partners and cargo we deliver and seeing the impact it has on their lives is the very best bit.

My job involves a lot of chatting with the partners MAF flies — emailing, phoning and asking for permission to join them on their journey with MAF and beyond. I interview, collect consent and collate stories which I then write up and edit; taking plenty of photos and videos along the journey.

If it’s a really colourful, interesting story, it can be used by MAF magazines around the world.

It’s really exciting when you realise that your story has gone global and ended up in magazines in India, Finland or Hong Kong!

I’ve learnt over the years that the more you network and work together as a team, the better time you’ll have working.

In my role, I can be a bit of a one-man band, playing seven instruments at once (juggling consent forms, camera, interview notes, etc), but I can often ask the pilots for help, and they pass over audio recordings of interviews and photos from the flights I can’t get on because they’re full.

Through writing stories about the amazing partners we fly and why they need our planes, more people then choose to support MAF, which enables us to provide subsidised flights for our partners.

They are fully aware of what my role is, and how they will benefit from reduced flight costs, so thankfully they’re usually very willing to send through the information I need to help support a story written about them.

Our partners know MAF is helping them and making their life easier, so the support we get from them is wonderful.

What skills do you need?

I was always strong at English in school, and loved writing. You have to be good with people, and respectful of different cultures. I love learning different languages, and even learning just a few words of greeting always helps.

My editing skills weren't strong in the beginning, but MAF offered me training in photography and video editing, and now I love to take photos and produce videos. They also provided training for conflict management, which has definitely helped equip me to deal with any with any hostility that may happen but in a calm way.

CHAD

A ND A G U

Jill found a wheelchai r whi flew to her friend Jac ch MAF kson

this kind of o d to t n a w u yo If job, you’ll need ish Strong written Engl g A flair for storytellin Personable w people Confident with ne ction for A leader (when dire filming is needed) and video Basic photography editing skills ing of A good understand computers

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Best MAF adventures so far?

Too many to choose from! Perhaps the time I visited a traditional Karamajong village.

You had to kneel down and crawl through a small bracken entrance which is guarded by thistles and thorns at night to protect the village.

The settlement is full of Star Wars-like pods, full of grain and livestock.

The cattle are placed in the middle of the maze, to keep their most prized possession safe from thieves. I got to witness a huge dowry ceremony, where animals were paraded through the village and offered to the bridegroom’s family. It was an amazing time!

There’s also the time I visited Bidi Bidi, the world’s second largest refugee settlement. I interviewed MAF partners and saw how quickly the settlement was set up to host the millions of refugees flooding into Uganda.

It was fascinating to see how well the NGOs worked together so strategically.

How does your faith affect your role?

When I write, I really want whoever reads it to be encouraged in their faith and see how God is on the move.

I want people to see the good that’s going on in the world. We have enough negative news in the media, where we’re constantly bombarded with dark, hopeless stories.

That’s the biggest reason I love this role. I want to tell the positive stories that are going on! MAF definitely gets an eagle’s view into the good that is happening, even if it’s as a consequence of something terrible, like conflict in South Sudan. You then see a multitude of amazing people going in and trying to turn around the bad that has happened.

‘Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honourable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise’ (Philippians 4:8, NLT).

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ment Karamajong settle ce guarded entran It gives God glory to talk about the good, to show that He’s actively working throughout the world through some amazing people who love Him. There are passionate aid workers who are making huge differences in the world, and it’s not being talked about enough.

Any advice for young people wanting to go into journalism on the mission field?

Choose to trust God with your life. Give your life to Him and say, ‘Lord, please direct me. Show me what You want me to do.’ He can show you your purpose, your gifting, what He wants for you.

Life is never dull with God, it’s just an ongoing adventure.

The most difficult place God ever called me to was Chad. I was terrified about going – it felt like the worst thing God had ever asked me to do. But it turned into the biggest blessing!

It wasn’t at all easy at first, but eventually we fell in love with Chad. It taught me not to complain or question when God calls you to a place; to trust that God always has our best in mind, and His timing is perfect.

If you’re really serious about journalism, or a communications role, you might have to be willing to work in places others don’t want to go – just be willing to go where God wants you to go, and trust in His protection and guidance.

PRAY! Pray for healing for Ashley Judd as she undergoes physiotherapy, following surgery on her leg.

‘Don’t be afraid, for I am with you. Don’t be discouraged, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will hold you up with my victorious right hand’

Pray for protection and strength for Jill Vine as she adventures with MAF, telling stories about Uganda’s people.

Pray for more opportunities for MAF to help eye teams prevent blindness across the world

t any H av e y o u g o ests? Snap prayer requ n pray for us, so we ca you too!

Isaiah 41:10, NLT

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£50 e h t n o w @Tia her c u o V t a E Just ts!

— Congra

Wall What do you get when yo u lock an MAF aircraft mainten ance enginee r in quarant ine for tw o weeks w ith noth ing but woo den cutl ery?

New Snapchat account!

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25

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WIN A MOVIE KIT! HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS JUNGLE RESCUE THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF STORYTELLING!

Search ‘MAF Youth’ W maf-uk.org/youth E youth@maf-uk.org