With nowhere specific to formally base themselves while they’re here, the couple are ‘sofa-surfing’ until they return to PNG later this summer.
Finally flying to PNG in January 2021 after coronavirus restrictions lifted, the couple have spent 15 months there, housed in a secure compound and serving at MAF’s main air base, where Alan focuses on special building projects and Annette is part of the flight operations team.
Alan, a Civil Engineer, grew up with a fascination for aviation but was unable to pursue a professional flying career due to his eyesight.
Hearing about MAF as a teenager, Alan became a supporter and later a UK-based volunteer after a visit from one of MAF’s new diesel Cessna aircraft at White Waltham Airfield in 2013.
Challenges in PNG have included re-developing a remote MAF base at Vanimo on the north coast and renovating old passenger and freight facilities at Goroka in the Eastern Highlands. As Alan explains:
‘With limited local resources, MAF often has to fly in the tools and materials we need. All items need to be less than three metres long so they can fit inside our aircraft. If you forget something, it could be a five-day wait for the next plane. It needs a high degree of forward planning.’
Since the new Vanimo facility opened, MAF has been able to increase the frequency of flights there – facilitating vital services such as education projects, food deliveries and long-term development initiatives in the surrounding villages.
This isn’t Annette’s first time volunteering overseas. After graduating from Reading University, she spent two years teaching in Kenya at a local school.
‘Kenya,’ she recalls, ‘was a wonderful and exciting experience. The culture was so colourful, warm and joyful. I always knew I would be happy to live abroad. I find fulfilment in doing things other people wouldn’t necessarily want to do.’
Having also volunteered at a homeless project in central Birmingham, Annette has seen poverty from many angles.
‘People face tough situations around the world,’ she says, ‘but people are still people everywhere. Everyone tries to do the best they can with what they have. I like to be able to help make life better wherever I’m living.’
Neither are paid for their jobs but feel that volunteering on the frontline for MAF is part of God’s calling on their lives and gives them a purposeful retirement.
‘I don’t think of our lives as volunteering,’ Alan concludes. ‘I think of it as a job that needs doing. We’ve stepped up to the plate and life is far richer as a result.’
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