Our dream is to one day serve in mission aviation with Helimission using helicopters to support missionaries working in hard to reach locations.
Helicopters are very valuable tools in missions. They enable missionaries to reach remote villages in a fraction of the time with teams and equipment they may not have been able to take.
The following is an excerpt from the September 2003 newsletter of Brian and Faye Carson serving with Crosslinks.
“We have been helping Helimission to visit unreachable
areas in the North Rift Valley and Samburu (further to the North East),
as part of
evangelistic outreach with Africa Inland Church (AIC). In return for our
help they fly us to other unreachable areas where Anglican clergy and
evangelists are trying to penetrate. ‘Unreachable’ means there are no
roads and only a helicopter can land in these rocky, mountainous places.
It also means that no evangelistic work has been done in these places
before. Quite a challenge…It is wonderful to co-operate with other Churches
in this front-line, holistic work of preaching and healing. We could never
reach these people (East Pokot & Samburu) without this ‘team’ approach,
as to hire a helicopter costs up to $700US per hour.”
Helicopters are also used to bring in medical and relief teams to assist people in a disaster zone. The following is taken from the Helimission website on their outreach to Congo 2002 (translated from German)
"In January, three days after the volcanic eruption in Goma, the
Congo, two pilots from Helimission Kenya, landed with the helicopter in
Goma. More than 300,000 people were affected by the disaster and 100,000
lost their homes. The lava stream had divided the city into two parts
(east and west). The director of Helimission, Ernst Tanner, organised
the work with Doctors Without Borders, Asrames (the regional organisation
for medical supply), UN seismologists and the film team. Because of the
helicopter flights, seismologists were able to conclude a second eruption
was unlikely, Doctors Without Borders were able see an overview of the
refugee situation and Asrames was flown in to deliver
urgently needed medicines."
