Rescued in Agali

What do you do when you're stranded in the middle of the jungle in an airplane that won't start? You could try calling Triple A, but last I heard they weren't servicing Western Province.

Our pilot had a look under the cowling (I just learned that word and I'm very proud of it . . . the cowling of an airplane is like the hood of a car) and decided that a spring in the starter clutch was broken. Wouldn't you know it, not a single one of us had packed an extra Cessna 206 starter clutch spring! Whatever were we thinking? So we called back to Ukarumpa aviation with our satellite phone, and a noble pilot and mechanic spent their Saturday flying out to Agali to bring us a spring and fix the airplane. Meanwhile, Sara and I rechecked our word list and had a nice chat with lots of curious people.
Finally, on Saturday afternoon, over 24 hours after we had planned to arrive, we touched down in Selbang. We were still sitting in the plane, as the pilot slowed the engine, when I saw someone with a large backpack walking towards us and I did a double take, because at first glance I almost thought he wasn't a Papua New Guinean. My second glance revealed that he was most definitely NOT Papua New Guinean . . . a Caucasian male of unknown identity was walking down the airstrip towards our plane! Now, bear in mind that this is an extremely remote area . . . the nearest town takes four days to walk to, and there are no drivable roads. I'm not sure whether we were more surprised to see him or he was more surprised to see us! Turns out he was on a backpacking adventure, hurt his knee near that village and decided to wait for a plane to land . . . and 12 hours later ours landed! Our pilot flew him back to Agali (where the pilot was asked to preach in a church service the next day!) and then on to his next destination.

When the plane didn't start in Agali, as our pilot was poking around under the cowling, we prayed specifically that God would somehow use this series of (from our perspective) unfortunate events for good. I'm sure He has and will in ways we may never be aware of, but He also let us see a few of the good things He did with it. We were able to help the stranded backpacker . . . if we had landed the day before, when we'd planned to, he wouldn't have been there yet! The pilot had the opportunity to share God's truth with people in Agali the next day . . . if the starter spring hadn't broken he wouldn't have been there long enough to do that!

As you can see, we had our share of adventure before the survey really even started. And if you think the adventure ended when the survey began . . . well . . . you just keep thinking that and come back later to find out how wrong you were!