I Wish I Was Rich Enough To Burn Down The House & Start Fresh... But I'm Not.

Airfare to Alaska

We got here two years ago which means our organization has given us the green light to go home for six months. We’ll extend that a bit since we’re having a baby. We’re excited about it.

Our first destination is Alaska, which may be a shocking change of pace for our sweaty, sunburnt bodies fresh from a tropical island. We get cold when it’s 75 degrees. Elliot never wears a shirt anymore. We don’t even own shoes for the children since they’ve outgrown all of them and there isn’t really a need to buy new ones. They just go barefoot anyway. So flying straight to Alaska without shoes is kind of stupid, but it was my idea so it’s not all that surprising.

It was my idea because, for one thing, my brother and his family live there and we want to visit them.

Also, I’m ready for a change of scenery and Alaska is about as different as you can get.

Plus, the more pregnant Janice becomes, the less happy airlines are to fly her around. So either we visit my brother before the baby comes, or several months after. Flying around with a new baby is unpleasant, so that means we need to visit Alaska before the baby comes. It’s the most cost effective to simply add Alaska as a stop on our way home, so that’s what we did. They do sell shoes in Alaska, after all, and so I think we’ll be OK.

Janice isn’t so sure. “We’re going to freeze to death or get trampled by moose,” she says while shuddering.

The kids are excited for a change of scenery. Even Oliver is excited, and Oliver doesn’t even remember the US.

“Are you excited to go to America?” you ask him.

“Yea-ah!” he shouts back, using two syllables instead of one.

“Why?” you ask.

“To see my friends!” He says.

“Who are you friends?” you ask,

"Uhhhh…” He can’t remember any but seems convinced there are some there, if he could think a little longer.

I change the subject. “Are you excited to eat at Dairy Queen?”

Oliver laughs because he never heard of such a place.

“Burger King?”

Oliver laughs again, “Daddy, stop it.”

Geriatric Game Boys

Now this is going to be our first furlough so we’re not quite sure what to expect. I mean, I think I know what to expect but I was told that going back can a bigger cultural shock than coming here, and I wasn’t expecting that so we’ll see.

I do expect that we’ll be taking long plane rides again, which got me thinking.

As a kid, my mom and dad took my brothers and I, along with my Grandma, on a road trip from Pennsylvania out to Colorado, then back again. I remember throwing snowballs at each other on top of the Rocky Mountains in the middle of July. I also remember playing my Game Boy for long periods of time in the back of the minivan while we drove around looking for cheap motels.

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that my kids should have Game Boys. You can still buy the kind that I played with as a kid on eBay; the kind that looks like a brick, emits more bleeping than an angry truck driver, and offers you several hours of distraction for the price of two AA batteries. They don’t need wifi to work. In fact, they don’t even know what the internet is, which is a perfect, because letting my kids play GameBoy is almost as innocent as letting Grandma babysit them. There are no inappropriate ads suddenly popping up. There are no child predators messaging my kids. It’s basically an analog toy in this day and age. So I bought three Game Boys on eBay and had them come here with a work team that arrived last month. Now my kids had something to do on the long airplane ride and, since they each had one, they wouldn’t be screaming at each other on the plane.

That was the idea at least.

I dropped Elliot’s about ten minutes after I opened the box and broke its screen. Two days later Oliver broke another screen. Which leaves us with one. I’ll fix the broken ones once I get back to civilization. But for now they’re fighting over the one that’s left. I guess it builds their character as well as mine.

I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Packing Our Possessions

Being a missionary means saying goodbye, a lot. But not just to people - you say goodbye to houses as well. You never move permanently, just long enough to cause a headache before you go back again.

That’s what we’re doing, except when we come back to Papua New Guinea, we’ll be in a different house. This is because another family will be moving into our current house soon after we leave. We’re OK with that. But the house we might move into isn’t actually built yet (it’s in progress), and in the meantime we’ll be bouncing around America like a ping-pong ball finding it’s way through a house of mirrors.

This means we tried to prepare our all our stuff for purgatory by cramming it into totes, boxes, and old suitcases so it can wait for us to return but hopefully not decaying too much until we do. We’re basically trying to hit the “Pause” button on our lives in Papua New Guinea while we travel back and “Un-pause” our lives in the US. This actually isn’t possible because everything keeps going even after you leave. Maybe that’s why the return to the home country can be so shocking. You can’t imagine your world continues without you, but it does. You basically die for awhile and come back to life, except when you sit up in your coffin you find an empty room with dust bunnies and cobwebs, and get a little hurt that people aren’t still sobbing incoherently in the same spot they were when you left them.

Since we have to empty the house we’ve been forced to deal with all the things that settled into the corners because we didn’t know what to do with them. Things like a broken kid’s toy, for example, that I was perfectly capable of fixing but not sure I wanted to. I either had to throw it away, fix it, or pack it.

Let’s just say a lot of old toys have been disappearing without our children’s knowledge or consent. But ignorance is bliss, as they say. They don’t seem to mind if they don’t know.

Janice is so tired of packing that she’s literally having dreams about it. She complains about it every morning. “I dreamt about packing last night. Ugh.” She sighs. Then she gets out of bed and trips over some totes we had packed. I guess we’re living the dream, literally.

I wish I was rich enough to burn down the house and start fresh every time. But I don’t think that way because I’m an arsonist, I think it’s just because I hate multi-tasking. I like simple solutions to complex problems and just deleting everything and starting over would be simpler. I think.

“But that’s not realistic. Why waste timing talking about it? Why are you just standing there? Put this box in the other room.” 

Multitasking Malfunctions

But mostly, I hate multi-tasking. And packing up your house while you’re living in it requires a lot of packing, and unpacking, and then repacking. It requires remembering where you put things. This is a challenge for me because I forget where I put something the instant I put it down. Sometimes I forget where something is while I’m still holding it. Sometimes Janice will find me outside staring at the sun and drooling on myself because I got distracted by a bird while I was taking out the trash.

There is an airplane mechanic named Paul New. He spoke at a safety seminar I attended. I have long forgotten the safety spiel but I still remember one phrase that resonated deeply with me. He said, “I’m so forgetful that my wife is scared that when I get dementia she won’t be able to tell.”

I often steal that line. What’s the saying, “Plagiarism the highest form of flattery”? No, that’s not quite it. Whatever.

I’m like one of those pocket knifes with a hundred different tools. Even though I have a lot of abilities, I can only use one at a time. If you try to open all of them at once, it’s not only impractical, it could be dangerous.

I’ve recently heard that it’s not actually possible to multi-task. What we call multi-tasking is actually just switching between tasks quickly.

Janice can do this well. It’s why she’s a good mother and I’m not. She will hold several tasks at various states of completion in her head and effortlessly switch between them. In contrast, as soon as my brain is handed a new task, however completely menial and inconsequential it is, it will immediately shove everything else off its desk, right into the trash can, and focus eagerly on the shiny new distraction. Then, when it needs to go back to the previous task, all it finds is an empty desk. I have to sort through the hopeless mix of leftovers from many other tasks that are still in the trash can. It’s not a good filing system. Every time I switch tasks it takes a lot of time and I usually lose half the information I started with. 

This is why I prefer to stubbornly ignore everything else until the task on the desk is done. It’s also why I never get anything done because it’s a wildly improbable that I’ll be left alone long enough to finish something. Maybe this is why I daydream about living in isolation in Alaska. I could finally get a task done without being interrupted. Although I’d probably get trampled by a moose, which would be distracting.

Janice, the master planner, has been giving me tasks so that that each new task is interrupting the old one before it’s finished. I spent the last week wandering around the house settings things down and picking them up again, in no useful order.

It’s very frustrating and apparently it’s hereditary. 

Sometimes I’ll order Elliot to take out the trash. He typically does it without complaining but he’ll usually get lost along the way. After an hour, Janice will remind me that I told Elliot to take out the trash and “Where is Elliot?” anyway. He’ll be out on the porch, shirtless, showing his friend that he can make farting noises with his armpit. The trash bag will be lying there at the bottom of the steps.

“Elliot!” I’ll yell, usually loudly and at great effect. Elliot jumps because he was too involved in his art to notice my arrival.

“Daddy! You scared me.”

“Why isn’t the trash taken out?”

“Oh! Haha. I forgot.”

A Hangar Handoff

It’s even worse when I’m stressed.

I was told I need to hand off the hangar projects to Nick, who’s going to take over the maintenance. He’s a pilot at heart but has been convinced to act like a Chief Engineer, hence his title: Acting Chief Engineer. He does a good job and that’s why he’s stuck doing it. I always warn pilot/mechanics not to mention the mechanic part or else that’s what they’ll be doing, whether they like it or not. This is because there’s a shortage of mechanics in this industry. Nick’s problem is that he’s actually a good mechanic and finds it morally reprehensible to do a bad job on purpose, and so he’s stuck. He just got back from a six month long furlough and wanted a status report. I obliged.

“Here,” I say, pointing to a pile of stuff, “This isn’t done.”

I point to something else, “Didn’t get done with that.”

I point to a wheel assembly needing a new tire. “That’s behind schedule.”

I nudge a pile with my foot. “I was going to fix that but I have to fix the other thing first, which is waiting on that thing over there, which is also broken. The part is stuck in the mail.”

Nick nods his head. “So… not much has changed?”

“Nope!” I say. “Except there’s more corrosion on the planes than when you left. Maybe you should make a note of that.”

I did manage to always keep two out of the three airplanes operational during those six months. But I found my limitations, and they are somewhere around keeping two out of three airplanes operational for six months by myself. Not having enough mechanics on the field is a real problem. It’s a problem in the commercial world where people get paid for their efforts. It’s even more of a problem when you’re trying to convince mechanics they need to raise a ton of money, move to the middle of nowhere, and maintain forty year old airplanes in the most corrosive environment on earth with poor logistical support. For some reason, there’s not many of us who want to do that. I’ve asked myself why I’m doing it many times. I’ve been grumpier than normal the last six months. But it is nice to be needed and the grief wasn’t without cause. We flew around 684 patients in the last two years, all of whom didn’t pay a cent for their medivacs, many of whom would’ve died if they had to do so.

If you’re an airplane mechanic, take that last paragraph as an invitation (maybe not a convincing one) to come help and paid with eternal rewards, if not physical ones.

It’s not an easy job. But we’ve learned a lot over the last two years. We’ve been stretched further than I thought we could be. We’ve been through the fire and, like I’ve said before, when the heat from life starts melting you, all the crud in your soul comes to the top. I’ve been disgusted by what I’ve seen come out of myself.

I’m coming home again, wherever that is, knowing I’m less of a man than I thought but somehow more of a man than when I left.

Note: It is April 24, 2025 and in a few days we’ll be in the States for furlough. We’re in the uncomfortable spot of needing to raise more support. It takes a lot for me to admit that because I hate raising support, even more than boiling in my own sweat while lying in the back of an airplane. We wouldn’t mind speaking at your church, sharing with your small group, or even having a coffee with you personally (even though I’m an introvert) to discuss what we’re doing and how you and your pocketbook can be part of it. But here’s the thing, we need permission to come speak at your church. It’d be weird if I just went to a random church and started yelling about stuff from the back. So if you want to invite us, email me (joshs@samaritanaviation.org) or message Janice on some social media platform and we’ll see if we can scheduled something.

Or you can simply support our work here in Papua New Guinea by clicking the link below. It will make this grumpy missionary dad less grumpy.

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