I
have mentioned before that I have been tasked to coordinate this project from
our Arusha base. We plan to help the Evangelical
Lutheran Church of Tanzania (ELCT) with medical and outreach safaris to
some remote villages. Thanks to your prayers we made some good progress during
our visit in August. We were able to utilize local machinery to work on one of
the strips which enabled us to complete the work in less than a week! Without
it, the Lerumo strip would have been postponed until next year.
New Airstrips
We also cut some grass and filled
some termite holes to repair the airstrip of the region’s main town, Orkessumet.
The monthly safaris will be based from here, we will pick up the teams from the
ELCT Hospital and take them to the other villages. In August we flew to
Orkessument, drove to Lerumo for a ground inspection and then went back to do
the first landing. Now the strip is ready to use pending the paperwork...
Since our visit we received news from the third village, Kitwai B, that
they are also ready for a ground inspection of the airstrip. We will schedule
that visit as soon as possible.
The next, and ongoing, step is
getting all the paperwork ready so that we can submit it to the Civil Aviation
Authority. The process is time consuming as the paperwork goes back and forth
for village-, regional- and district signatures. After that the application
process will also take some time. As soon as all this is in order we will start
the safaris. Please pray that the process will keep moving and that we can
start with the work as soon as possible.
