I am shocked, scared, and sad. My cancer is back... Please pray for me! I'm gonna give God the glory!

Please pray for our niece Hannah. Several months ago she had a cancerous tumor removed from her brain. Everything has been going really well as far as her recovery until we found out just this week that her cancer is back. Not only is it back, but there are now eleven tumors which are in her spine and brain stem area. So, now, she has to have six weeks of daily radiation to try to reduce the size of the tumors and keep new ones from forming. After that, she will receive four chemotherapy treatments.

Please pray for our whole family during this time. This is a difficult and scary time, but all of us know that God is in control. He is the one taking care of all of us.

Pictures from around town.

There are so many interesting sights and sounds that we see here everyday, that have become completely normal to us. We used to marvel at this culture, and now we don't even take a second glance anymore. Today on our way to the grocery store we took some snapshot so that we could share some of these sights and sounds with you.

Overloaded vehicles are the norm here.

These high school girls are wearing their school uniforms.



This is a monument in town. We have never looked at it up close to figure out the meaning behind it.

This is the military hospital. Its a bit nicer than the normal hospital, but they only treat military people or their familes. By the way, the orange van is a form of taxi, but works more like a bus.


One of the hundreds of small mosques in town.

Man bringing goods to the market.

One of the larger mosques in town.

Same mosque, different angle. I wish the photo could capture the volume of noise coming from the loudspeakers.

Lots of people bring their restaraunts with them wherever they go. Many of these portable restaraunts (most of which are a bit smaller) go by the front of our house all day long. They usually ring a bell, honk a horn, or yell to advertise what they are selling.

Don't really know where this guy is going, but he is getting a lot of stuff moved. When we drive down the street we have to make sure we don't hit guys like this as they use the street too. Sometimes they can be a bit unpredictable as to where they are going to go.

Update

Well, we are not grounded anymore, but we are still trying to figure out exactly where we stand on this issue. We would appreciate your prayers as we continue to figure it all out.

The dock never did float this time around. We figure if the water would go up only a few more inches it would have floated so that we could push it out in the river, but it stopped raining over a week ago, and now the river is slowly going back down. Oh well, maybe after dry season.

Grounded Again

Several times in the last few months our little flight program in PalangkaRaya has been temporarily grounded. Looks like we may be grounded yet again for a few days. Please pray for wisdom in reconciling the situation so that we can better serve the people here.

By the way, our dock isn't quite floating. It's really close, but it hasn't rained in a week. So even though the water level is just inches from floating the dock. We are thinking the dock probably won't float this time around.

The River is Rising

It's only a matter of days before the river rises enough to float our new dock. Since I took this picture yesterday it's been raining non-stop. Our villages up-river are quite deep right now as you can see in the blog I wrote yesterday. This will be an exciting week for us as we float this dock out into the middle of the river.

River Water Up In Kuala Kurun.

This Saturday morning I got a call that there was a lady in Kuala Kurun that needed to get to the hospital in PalangkaRaya. The below pictures are the scene I found when I showed up to the village. Normally the steps in the picture go all the way to our dock. This morning the water was up so high that they had to make a makeshift bridge in order to carry the patient across. In the bottom picture you can see the ambulance waiting in the background. They patent had to wait about ten minutes in order for them to build this little bridge.


Since the water is coming up in Kuala Kurun it means that it's only a matter of a few days until our new concrete dock is floating. Tomorrow, I'll post more recent dock pictures.