Where in the World Am I?

On final approach, descending across Lake Sentani.

Don't worry - I'm not lost nor did I get lost on the way between Jakarta and my new home. I made it and I thought I'd share a little bit more about where I'm going to be serving. Get ready for some head-scratching unless you're already very familiar with the geography of this part of the world.

I am currently living in Papua, Indonesia. This is the eastern-most province of Indonesia and is located on the world's second largest island, New Guinea. Now just 40 miles away from my home is the border of...Papua New Guinea (commonly abbreviated PNG), which is an independent nation. The island is split down the middle, and Papua, Indonesia is on the western half and PNG owns the eastern half. Confusing, I know! I guess it's akin to having a Nevada City in California or something like that. If it helps any, the region of Indonesia I'm living in was once called Irian Jaya.

Does this picture take care of the thousand words? (Borrowed the graphic from Wikipedia)

Confusing countries aside, I live in a little suburn town called Doyo Baru, just a few minutes away from the larger town of Sentani. The region's main commercial airport is located in Sentani and a lot of mission operators like MAF, JAARS, and AMA fly out of Sentani airport. Adventist Aviation Indonesia has its own campus in Doyo Baru and we're fortunate to have our own runway and hangars right there. With staff housing located on the airbase, I get to live a few hundred yards away from work!

Time for some produce. It really helps to know numbers here.

Right now I'm in the process of getting everyday life figured out here which means stuff like learning how to shop at the pasar (market), setting up the house I'm staying in, figuring out to make bread (quality whole wheat bread isn't to be found here), and dispatching the sizeable cockroaches that make regular, unwanted appearances in my kitchen. Language learning will come next and then as the mission planes are returned to service from maintenance and my FAA pilot's license is validated, it will be on to flight training!

And that written test I took in Jakarta? After 2 weeks of waiting, the results are finally in: I passed!! And just to satisfy the curiosity of my former flight students who might be reading this, I scored 80% on one and 72.5% on the other, haha! But the typical American that I am, I was just happy to pass in the first place! All that matters is I don't have to go and make a special trip back to Jakarta to retake that thing.

As I settle in, there are so many things to thank God for. The written test was a big one for me, but also just the wonderful blessings of everyday life: a beautiful campus to live on with plenty of clean well water, the ability to eat fresh fruits and vegetables again after carefully avoid all such raw produce in Jakarta, and a great team to serve alongside. And most of all, I'm thankful for the promise that in the not-too-distant future we're going to be going home - to heaven - for good. That's going to be a great day. You coming?

Friday evening sunset at Doyo Baru.

Almost Home

I scanned through the 40 questions on the paper test in front of me, trying to calculate whether I’d answered at least 28 right. Many of the problems had been familiar, but to my dismay I’d come across a good number of ones that I’d either forgotten or hadn’t seen before. Part of the difficulty of the test was the basic grammar of the questions. Gary said they’d been translated into Indonesian from English, and then back into English from Indonesian! Some were based on the Civil Aviation Safety Regulations (CASRs) which were borrowed from the U.S. FARs, so that helped, but others were from sources I would have no way of finding. I had no idea what Annex 2 was, for instance, and what it had to do with the high seas, if anything. So having done my best to study the prep material I’d been provided, I followed Gary’s advice on the test to keep praying and answering.

Last train ride - for now. Glad to be done for the time being!

I decided I’d answered the questions as best as I could so I caught the attention of the proctor and traded my completed air law test for the meteorology test. I felt much more confident on that one, although I realized afterward that I’d messed up on at least a few. Oh well, all that matters is that I get the 70% necessary to pass!

As far as if I’d passed or not? “The results will get sent directly to your organization,” the proctor informed me as I turned in my last gradesheet. “Do you have any idea when the results will come?” I queried. He shrugged his shoulder with a sheepish look on his face. “I don’t know…I can ask later, but maybe one week.” My eyebrows went up. “Or less,” he quickly added. Phooey. Ah well, weren’t you saying something about patience, Michael?

Time for some swapping around.

If patience is a quality for a missionary to acquire, flexibility is an attribute that he must increasingly exercise. As I got out of my exam, I discovered my latest opportunity to be flexible. “How much do your suitcases weigh?” Choqky asked me. After we briefly sorted out pounds to kilos, he told me why he was asking. “The airline you’re going on to Papua only allows 1 suitcase of 20 kilos. So maybe you can rearrange what you’ve packed and take the most important things in one suitcase and the other suitcases will get shipped by boat next week.” Lovely. If there’s one thing I’d rather do when traveling, it’s keep all my belongings together. I’ve already lost a suitcase in Africa and don’t really want to do a repeat. But when I found out the extra baggage fee - $10 per kilo - it was pretty obvious why the boat was the best option.

Simon! The awesome mechanic from Costa Rica.

As I was pondering what I would bring in my one suitcase - isn’t everything important? - I got a welcome surprise. I was going to be traveling with Simon, a mechanic who would be giving Gary some much-needed help with work on the planes. Knowing how many suitcases I’d brought, Gary was checking with him if he was traveling with luggage - and he wasn’t, so he could check a second bag for me! I couldn’t be happier. It made the job much easier as I rearranged my belongings between suitcases that afternoon.

That brings us to today. After checking out of the hotel this morning, I tagged along with Choqky for one more metro ride to downtown to order some appliances for the mission base. Then back to pick up the suitcases and head out to the airport to meet Simon and catch our flight to Papua. It’ll be a red-eye flight, but I’m stoked that we’ll be landing at 7:40 a.m. which means I’ll actually be able to see my new surroundings as I arrive, rather than everything being black and generic. So here we go. I’ve been on the road for 2 weeks since leaving California and I’m ready to get to Papua. So on to…home.

One more semi-sleepless night to go.

Welcome to Indonesia!

The Dreamliner.

I gazed with keen interest at the sleek interior of the Japan Air Lines Boeing 787 that I had just climbed aboard. This was my first time to fly on the Dreamliner and I was pretty stoked that both international legs were going to be on the same type of plane. There was plenty of legroom, nice soft lighting, a cabin that apparently had more humidity than regular metal-body planes, and - oh yes! those huge passenger windows that didn't have pull-down shades, but instead a magical dimming function operated by the press of a button. I happily settled down into my seat and buckled up for the trip.

Umpteen hours, and a very sore posterior later we were finally descending through the night toward Jakarta Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. I peered out the window, straining to catch a view of this new country, but there were only a few lights scattered in the murk and nothing much to see. A few moments later we were on the ground and the humidity immediately fogged the windows, blocking any more sightseeing of the airport.

It's always encouraging to see the rainbow, a reminder of God's care.

Our flight was early, but the length of the immigration line more than made up for gained time. As I inched closer to the front, I eyed the officers apprehensively, trying to guess if there would be any difficult questions to deal with. There were none. I stepped forward, gave my passport, the officer stamped it, and I was in Indonesia.

By the time I emerged from immigration, all the luggage from my flight had long been claimed, except for mine. An airport staff member was wandering around calling my name for me to get my pile of suitcases. Piling it all on a cart, I made my way through customs and then sent a message to Choqky, AAI’s operations manager who would be picking me up. Thank God for WiFi!

Grins all around. With Choqky, Operations Manager.

I stood awkwardly for a moment near the exit looking down  at my phone to see if he’d replied when I heard a friendly voice. “Are you Michael Lombart?” I looked up at the smiling face and grinned back. “You must be Choqky.” Choqky had been doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes with my paperwork and it was great to finally meet the guy who had helped get me to Indonesia.

Choqky helped me lug my suitcases over to a taxi and then got me to the hotel room where I’d be staying for my time in Jakarta. It had been an exhausting trip, it was after midnight, and I was so ready to drop into bed that night - after taking a few moments to write in my gratitude journal first. It had been such a smooth trip, no hiccups in immigration, and...all my suitcases had made it!

With nothing on the schedule in the morning - Choqky had planned a day off for me to rest and adjust - I could sleep as much as I wanted. Turned out to be a grand 5 hours thanks to jet lag, but it was nonetheless wonderful to sleep lying down again!

My stopover in Jakarta was for paperwork purposes. I needed to take a written on Indonesian aviation regulations and get a medical checkup done by the Indonesian aviation authority. After that was all done I could head on to my final destination of Papua. I’d arrived on Monday night and the plan was to get the appointments done in time for me to head to Papua by the weekend. But do things ever go quite accordingly to plan? I think you’re getting the idea now! 

If there’s one thing I’m finding you learn and relearn and relearn as a missionary, it’s patience. Sometimes things move exceedingly quickly and you have to be able to ride the wave, but more often than not it’s one delay after another. In my case, I found out I would need to extend my stay a bit beyond the weekend due to some snags that were still getting resolved. Ah well, no great hardship. At least I could take it easy.

A classic Indonesian dish called capcay.

Over the next few days I got a good initiation into life in Jakarta, starting with the cuisine. I quickly discovered what it was like to eat rice - white rice - for every meal. The vegetarian dishes I tried were pretty good and I particularly enjoyed the tempeh, a taste for which got me in trouble over the weekend. At church potluck I think I overloaded on the different kinds of tempeh and got a bad case of indigestion. I’d been so careful too, trying to avoid fresh vegetables, fruits with skins, and anything remotely suspect, and yet there I was on the metro back from church growing increasingly nauseous.

Rush hour at the train station.

The smells that wafted in me each time the metro doors opened, followed by the swaying motion of the train was almost too much for me and my churning stomach threatened to rebel. Somehow I made it back to the hotel without upchucking, though I  lwondered in retrospect if it would have been better to get rid of the problem once and for all. It took me a couple days to get completely back to normal.

After three days of waiting with nothing in particular to do except study and find a way to amuse myself, were finally able to take care of one important piece of business, namely my flight physical. The DGCA requires foreign pilots to get a one-time aviation medical checkup prior to letting them use their original country’s medical certificate for flight privileges. So it was off to the medical center to find out what they wanted to do to me.

Trying to see which station I need to go to next.

The whole process was fairly involved compared to the FAA medical. I checked in, got my checklist and began the two hour of process, after which I had been poked, x-rayed, wired up to an EKG, had my hearing tested, and...my teeth inspected?! It was all rather amusing actually, as I made my way through the various stations, feeling like I was being put through an extended NEWSTART Health Expo. I was eventually deemed “Fit” and left the place with my Indonesian First Class medical certificate and a poster sized x-ray of my thorax.

One more task remained and that was the enigmatic Indonesian validation written test. While I struggled with knowing quite how to prepare for the test that seemed to be taken from multiple sources, known and unknown, Choqky was having quite the time trying to get me scheduled for it. Friday ended with no answer from the DGCA on a test date, which meant Monday was out and I would spend another day in Jakarta. Immediately after breakfast on Monday Choqky got back to work checking to see if I’d been scheduled. I didn’t hear from him until lunchtime when my phone buzzed and I saw a text from him: “I got your exam schedule. Tomorrow at 9:30.” I would be leaving for Papua the next day. Praise God! Time to for some final studying and then on to the test and Papua!