We used a hoist to lift the airplane fuselage off of the floats and to mount it to a transport cradle we fabricated.

The floats were stacked on top of each other and a shelf was built for the wings overhead. The fuselage will be rolled into the space where the cameraman is standing.

It’s been awhile since our last communication and I apologize for that. Hopefully you weren’t pacing around the mailbox chewing on your fingernails while you waited because they would be awfully short by now. I know because I’ve been doing it.

Every time I sat down to write a newsletter, something urgent required my attention. By the time I started again, the story had changed.

Now I finally have time to write because our passports and our visas have yet to arrive – despite being shipped overnight from the Papua New Guinea embassy in Washington D.C. on March 28th! As I write this, it’s April 1st and no passports yet. All we have is a tracking number that isn’t working. I don’t want to point fingers but let’s just say the Devil is delighted with the United States Postal Service right now. Our tickets, which were scheduled for March 31, have been canceled and we haven’t rescheduled yet. The hinges on our mailbox have been worn out because we’re checking it so often. Never has a mailman been so anticipated and so angrily dismissed as ours has in the past few days.

We’re all disappointed. The kids were ready to see our new home. All our goodbyes have been said and our internet has been shut off. We’ve been prepping for months (even years) for this and now we’re stuck so thank you for praying that our visas arrive quickly!

On the plus side, we’ve had so much support. We didn’t know we were so loved! Thank you!

Waiting is a change of pace from last week. I think the last month was one of the most stressful of our lives. Janice was working hard at getting rid of things we didn’t need and packing things we did, although she got pretty tired of deciding which was which. I’m grateful for her foresight to begin this process months ago, calmly and rationally. I usually wait until the ship is listing badly and ready to sink before I start heaving everything over the side, wild eyed with panic. Despite all the preparation, we still threw a lot of things out at the last minute. The garbage truck was probably over its legal weight limit after it left our curb.

Adi and Elliot play with suitcases in the dining room because, well, there aren’t other toys to play with right now.

Grandma & Grandpa Snader brought Legos and said goodbye a week before we were supposed to leave.

People have been asking us if we’re ready to leave. A month ago our furnace quit right before a cold snap and, as we huddled around a smoking kerosene heater in our living room, we found ourselves eagerly anticipating tropical climates. Still, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and suddenly wonder if we’ve lost our minds. We’re all the emotions, all at once. But now that our departure has been postponed, we’ve found that we were really, very ready to leave.

The last two months I was “in charge” of packing Samaritan Aviation’s plane into a 40’ long shipping container. I learned the value of a good team. It’s odd being the “supervisor” to people who have decades more experience than I do but everyone was very good at pretending I was in charge. I’m happy with how it went but I’m really not sure until it arrives in Papua New Guinea if it was packed well enough. Despite being in constant panic, I learned a lot in the past few months, kind of like being thrown in the deep end of a pool. In these situations, we find our arms and legs move faster than we thought. We just needed someone to push us in so we could find that out.

This will be Samaritan Aviation’s third floatplane in the country and it’ll be used to expand their operation into an even more remote area in the southern side of the island, down on the Fly River. So if the plane gets damaged during shipping, it’s not just money that’s at stake, but Samaritan’s readiness to serve one of the most vulnerable populations in the world will be set back a year or two. Pray that the plane arrives safely!