Home Stretch

Well, we're on our final week of training here in Nampa - time sure flies! Please continue to pray for us as we complete this phase of training. The flight training is extremely demanding, with little room for error, so pray that the Lord will help me in this final week. Above is a photo of an airstrip called Oneway, and its not called that for no reason! Its a 8% sloped, gravel runway, with a large cliff near the end, making it possible to takeoff and land only one way. You can read a little more about what we've been doing here in Nampa on our August Newsletter that we just sent out. If you would like to be on our mailing list, please send me an email, and we would be happy to add you to our list! You can also view our past newsletters online at http://www.mafkrul.com/ and click on about us.

Just so you know, we plan on driving all the way back to Chilliwack some time this week (depending on how my training goes). We'll see ya then!

A Taste of Training

Its been a great week of flight standardization. We practiced up slope landings, terrain flying, air drops, emergency procedures, and much more! On Thursday we went to a large dry lake bed where we could practice a whole range of maneuvers and emergency procedures. You can see in the photo above that its over 5 miles across, so after we landed there we setup a runway using orange cones. This allowed us to practice maximum braking, aborted takeoffs and landings, as well as low level maneuvering! Lots of fun! We also setup a target on the ground to use for airdrops to see how accurate we could get. After a bit of practice I was able to consistently drop the packages within 50 ft of our target - good thing to know! The hardest part is compensating for the strong winds - they were gusting over 18 mph that day. The nice thing about practicing at the lake bed was that if anything happened at any altitude, we would just land! You can imagine how dirty the plane was after a full day of having fun!

Groundschool Complete

Here's a picture of our Standardization class including the instructors. On Friday afternoon I completed the ground school portion of standardization, which means that on Monday I begin flying!

Last week we were very excited to have my parents along with my sister, Esther, come visit us here in Nampa. We had a great time together!

Help Ship our Belongings!!

(photo taken by fellow MAFer Michael Broyles)

We have begun the painstaking task of packing / purchasing all of the items that we will need for the move to Haiti. We have been told that most household items are much more expensive in Haiti or not even available. Thus we have begun looking for appliances, small furniture items and more that we will be needing to live in Haiti.

No More Pictures!!

Breaking news tonight:

The Krul's photo gallery has come to a halt! I went to take a picture today of a perfect Kodak moment, only to find that our camera's life was over! Fortunately we didn't loose any of our pictures, but here it is in a million pieces. Wilhelmina tried to take it apart as the last resort to attempt to fix it, but to no avail. We have come to the conclusion that the small motor that operates the lens has burnt out. So until further notice, we will have to make do without.

Blessings,

~ The Kruls ~

Rested Up - Ready for More!

I close my eyes for a split second and take a deep breath. My heart is pounding and my thoughts are racing. What do I do now? I open my eyes again and focus on the drama unfolding around me. Welcome to security training! Role playing intense situations and learning how to respond is important no matter where you are, and we are thankful we can take part of this security training. We were trained how to handle hostage situations, car jackings, and much more! Let’s just hope that we don’t need to use it.

Sorry for the delay in posting! We just got back from sunny San Diego for a short holiday, so we didn’t get around to posting an update. It was a great time to relax and soak up the sun for few days in between classes. We are now refreshed and rejuvenated to face another 4 weeks of training. Next up Jason has 4 weeks of Flight Standardization – practicing back-country flying, landing on short landing strips and lots more! We’ll let you know how that’s going with our next update.