Our first joint effort with 4 different organizations: Palawan Adventist Hospital, Adventist World Aviation, PFM, and PAMAS (that’s us ! See pics of the medical mission to the remote PFM Tagbanua 2 project in conjunction with their contextualized evangelistic meetings. Some of the things provided: Doctors, Nurses, circumcisions, consultations, meds, vitamins, toothbrushes, health education, and Tagalog sharing
pamphlets.

The helicopter has been flying more frequently during this busy Malaria/Typhoid season, bringing patients out of the mountains that need blood transfusions or more care. Multiple supply runs and bringing visitors for the missionaries has also given opportunity for more experience (in the heli) for Andrey.

Muslim ministry begins! Thanks to Danny and Rovelyn Henson who recently arrived back from the states with their new baby, we were able to enjoy a very beneficial Muslim training seminar. Following this God has opened up doors to meet weekly with an Imam (Muslim priest) and neighboring families to study the Quran and Bible together!

On request by the Muslim families, we have also provided a Muslim friendly children’s program lead by Tonya (Andrey’s wife). This has recently branched into 5+ other programs in conjunction with Bible studies which is keeping us hopping. We also provide medical help and health education after the programs in the poorest areas.

Brooke’s Point youth and classmates reach out with some literacy programs in our area (Limbasan and Lapiak) Church members were especially targeted so they could learn to read the Bible and Hymbooks.
Dorcas/sewing ministry by Michel (tailoring donated clothes to kids and patients sizes): Thanks to the donated sewing machine and boxes of used clothes, Michel stays very busy in her free time sewing, organizing and distributing clothes to the very needy. She has started one poor, SDA “widow” (her husband is in prison) learning how to sew and sell or trade clothes to the very poor people in her village, which also gives her a little profit and food to help her own family survive.

Motorcycles donated for Bro. Nitz (Bible worker) and one remote PFM project: This seems like a relatively small thing ($800-$900) but such a huge help to Bible workers in this country. We’ve seen first hand how it really enhances the evangelistic work.

Sponsored students to Palawan Adventist Academy get compliments from their teachers and classmates: Several are top students in their class. Joanne was voted pastor for her class. Darlene, a very sweet and God-fearing student has spent all her free time when at home (near our place) doing Bible studies with her family--often leading the studies herself. She was asked to speak at late notice for their school camping trip. She was so nervous and didn’t want to do it but everyone kept cheering and pushing her to accept. So, she prayed and asked God and her dad (Bro. Nitz) for help. It’s so touching how she tells the story. . .

“I said ‘oh lord please help me’. . . Oh how great I made it! I am thankful to God he didn’t let me alone in the time that I need his help. He is always there if we work for him. He says in the book of Jeremiah, my favorite verse, that I am going to get force to go on. He says ‘I am going to put my words in your mouth even you are a child’. We don’t need others to lead us to get support. No other than Jesus is our refuge. We pray and ask for help to God and he always hears our prayer if it is in the bottom of our heart.”

Others relate that after she spoke the teachers said “Wow, these Brooke’s Point students are really amazing!”

And God has really blessed her family because of their dedication to God’s work. With the new motorcycle and now another sponsor, they are going full time doing Bible studies and leading the new Limbasan church.

A guitar was also donated for their little church, which they are very excited about, along with English/Tagalog hymnals. They have been responsible for multiple baptisms--even just a few weeks ago--with more on the way. Darlene will be on summer break soon so she can join in the work again.

Hangar trusses coming up

Dear friends and family,
We're wrapping up a most wonderful time of busyness and fun! Besides a couple trips to Balabac for medical evacuations and a medical mission to Abo Abo, most of our time has been spent working on the houses. With lots of help from friends and God we were able to get both mission houses to a livable state before everyone arrived. We moved in on Sunday the 20th and went to pick up our family a couple days later on Thursday. We had such a great time with my family! They didn't even complain about the enormous amount of bugs (no screens yet) or trickle of water for showers (still working on a decent well). Sabbath we worshipped with the Cabar church, including the newest church plant group from Limbasan. My family donated Tagalog/English hymnals to each family and a guitar for the Limbasan group, which will greatly help their spiritual growth.

After "camping" at our place for the weekend we enjoyed a few days in Puerto relaxing and snorkeling. We all opted to be together for the travels so we had lots of bonding time crammed into various vehicles and hanging out the back! New Years Eve we travelled back to Manila (to my parents place) in time for some games and fireworks with friends. We had a delayed "Christmas Dinner" on New Years day, then on Sunday Scott and Mindi (my brother and sis-in-law) and Dwayne and I took a road trip up north to visit an S.I.L. aviation project (Wycliff Bible Translators) and the famous Banaue Rice Terraces. Unfortunately the terraces were socked in by fog the whole time, but we still had a great time (Scott and Mindi are headed to a remote hospital in Niger so it was the last time we would be able to spend time with them for awhile).

Thursday night we picked up Andrey from Puerto and then his wife and daughter arrived at midnight from the Ukraine. It has been a grand reunion for them! They were able to spend some good time making friends with the Ukrainian/Russian community here at AIIAS campus. Today we all head back to Puerto where we will hit the ground running!

Hope you all had a great holiday season. Thank you so much for the "gifts" and prayers from many of you this Christmas! We will try to keep you updated, though our internet will be greatly limited in our new place.
It is obvious and sobering to see how the time is so near. We don't want to miss any opportunities to reach more people before it's too late. As God continues to bless this work by providing month by month for our needs, we are grateful to Him and each of you for your part in making this happen.

Enjoy these pics of the housing progress and hangar trusses coming up by hand (with pulleys)! and time with our visiting family.

Bing and Mario arrive at church

Andrew rides a Caribao

Watching the heli take off

Second truss coming up

Student Joanne helped also

Bathroom coming along

First truss up

Andrey over Balabac

Welding the last truss

Tedious work

Sponsored students came to help

Medical Mission to Abo Abo

Sheryl helps paint

Dwayne on the job

Andrew tiling the bathroom

Visiting with church members

Trusses coming up

Andrey and Andrew are glad to be done

Visiting Kemantian

Dwayne in the heli

Grandpa takes a ride at age 86

Neighbor kids

We're moved in!

Scott, Mindi, and Wendy

Our family in Puerto

Rolly with foot washing

We were impressed by the work going on there. The whole weekend was refreshingly well organized, all run by the PFM missionaries, church members, and some supporting pastors from the city. The church members were growing spiritually and the baptized members seemed truly converted and ready. They had a nice footwashing service Sabbath a.m. and baptism in the afternoon.

We plan to bring another medicl team to the Tagbanua 2 project in a couple months in preparation for their upcoming meetings as well. A road has just been completed into the project area so it will be easier to access with a team. We hope to have a projector by then to assist them with their meetings.

We are in a push to get the housing construction finished on our land by next month. Our pilot Andrey's wife and daughter will be coming soon as well as returning missionaries Danny and Rovelyn with their new baby. We are so thankful God has blessed and things have gone relatively well, all things considered. Putting the trusses up for the hangar roof will be the last big project. We are also excited about my parents, brother and siter-in-law and her parents coming for Christmas and we hope to get things done and moved before then!

Dwayne in kitchen

Thanks to our recent medical group (and many of you) we now have 8 worthy students in Palawan Adventist Academy. The government has a special grant for the school for first year students so we are helping the school reach their goal as well as giving students an opportunity they would never have otherwise. The grant also gives us p5,000 off each student every year for the rest of their 4 years!

Praise God for new bike!

We also praise God for providing transportation for our medical and missionary work with a new motorcycle! Michel especially keeps it busy running back and forth to the hospital helping patients. I realized the other day that we had a unique life when I stopped to think about the chicken in my lap, cocounts in my backpack and rice under the seat! Later that night it was confirmed as I felt the warm blood bags on my lap between Michel and me as we sped to the hospital with our donors clinging behind. We would like to purchase a couple more bikes for some worthy layworkers and missionaries we know that are walking hours every day to visit interests and do Bible studies.

Keep praying for the revival of the churches around here and the Holy Spirit to fill them. Praise God for a small breakthrough with the Brooke's Point youth who have 3 new Bible study students and are learning to be more organized and consistent with their outreach.

Wendy's Birthday

Coming into shape

Dwayne:

Andrey has been welding hangar trusses together. We have one done and are working on the second now. We finally got the problems worked out with our generator/welder. After the second voltage regulator burned up, I threw it away and replaced it with a resistor. It is much simpler and more reliable now. Now we can change the welding amperage by changing resistors.

I have been flying more with Andrey to get him trained in our helicopter and used to the type of flying we do in the mountains. We have had a couple of emergency medical calls from the mountains but problems with the helicopter kept us grounded. Problems consisting of rats chewing the new spark plug wires through for the second time and drive belts turning themselves on their sides for reasons I have yet to figure out. We have things worked out now till something else breaks; we just installed a new starter relay so we don't have to start it from the outside with a wrench anymore.

Wendy:
We've been as busy as ever lately with 6 patients in the hospital—coming and going—ranging from Meningitis to Dengue, Typhoid, TB, and Rabies. Most of them also have Malaria, but unfortunately the doctors often fail to treat for it because they don't realize our patients (from the mountains) almost always have Malaria along with whatever else they have. I have occasionally been able to gently convince a doctor to prescribe Malaria medications even with a supposed “negative” blood smear. But I have to respect their positions and keep friends with them so I rarely push.

Last night I was able to convince a doctor to give Quinine to one of our patients whom I felt really needed it. She was having shaking chills and high fever every afternoon and that was her main problem. They were actually giving her Qoartem, another Malaria drug, but we haven't found it to be very effective at all, especially for severe Malaria. Then the next hurdle is finding the medicine. The government is supposed to provide all the Malaria medications, but they are often out of IV Quinine (which may explain why they don't like to prescribe it), so we have to find our own. Luckily I found the Quinine, though very expensive, and the baby is doing much better already.

Sad story
We had a sad, though not uncommon, experience the other night with an 11-month-old, Meningitis baby. The family was very poor, uneducated and had waited too long to bring her. We had spent several days praying, sharing the gospel, and teaching the family how to pray for their very sick baby. I even gave my tri-monthly allotment of blood to her, but it was to no avail. Michel and Sheryl (her nurse, friend that has come to help us for awhile) and I had spent most of the day back and forth from the hospital and had finally gotten home and crashed into bed, only to be texted by the hospital informing us that the baby had died. This was after several late nights in a row back and forth to the hospital. We went back immediately and found the family out back in the cold, dirty morgue crying in grief. We comforted them and asked them what they wanted to do. They wanted to go home, so we made the sad 30-minute drive out to Bingbilang. The stench was overwhelming—it seemed too soon for the body to be smelling already so it must have been the parents. Despite our efforts in giving change of clothes and soap and encouraging patients and families to bathe, sometimes the smells can't be removed so easily.

I really enjoy my role here as a social worker/hospital chaplain/community health or village nurse even though it has it's downsides. I always thought all of those professions would be fun and rewarding and now I have all three in one! I know Jesus had a “dirty” job too while he was on this earth with uneducated, sin-filled people constantly asking for his help. I just have to pray for patience and wisdom like He had in every day and every case.

Night on the mountain
As Dwayne said, we have had several emergencies lately where we were not able to use the helicopter because of one thing or another. Rats and wear and tear from the helicopter being out in the weather are doing it's toll. The other day we got ready to fly into the mountains to pick up a patient only to find some brand new wires eaten through again by rats! So, I hiked an hour or so, straight up the mountain in the dark to bring a mom and brand new baby out of the mountains. (She was unable to deliver the placenta so they had to do it manually in the hospital.) Luckily she had lots of caring relatives that helped carry her out. We are anxious for this hangar to be finished! It will be a huge blessing to the project.

Medical Mission group
We're getting ready for a mission group this week from Michigan who will be sharing their expertise with us here for a week. We will take them to the surrounding villages and projects to do medical work and simple surgeries. There will also be a couple construction workers to help with our building project. We are limited in what we can do with our present helicopter but we are still praying with faith that God will provide the aircraft that he knows will best fit the needs.

Brooke's Point youth ready to serve
We just started a new outreach group with the young people of Brooke's Point church. They are such an inspiration with their eagerness to do something. They already lead the Wednesday night prayer meetings, Friday night vespers, and Sabbath afternoon AY program. We encouraged them to reach outside their church and they were very interested. They were just lacking someone to help them get started. We got them started and even helped them appoint their own leaders and they are already reaching out to their neighbors with Bible studies and health education.

New Adult Literacy class
We continue to have a steady group of church members in Cabar coming to our Health Workers class. It's great to have Sheryl here now, also, to help with the class and translation. Michel also started an adult literacy class for the new (and old) church members so they can read the Bible and sing and not be ashamed in society. It's fun to watch them color and trace letters and hear them sing.

New church for Cabar
God has blessed the little Cabar church near our land in many ways lately. They would like to send their thanks to each of you who have helped our project which has also benefited them in many ways! First of all, they praise God for the donation for the building of their new church! (Their present church is literally crumbling down with termites!) We encouraged them to step out in faith and start planning even though they had put in all they had which didn't amount to much in starting to even build. They are now praising God for being able to focus their energies on their 37 new members from the recent baptisms and begin the process of building without worrying about where they will get the money.

Perilous missionary work
The Cabar church is (or was!) small but very active in outreach and missionary work to their native Palawano neighbors who are even less fortunate than they are. We facilitate them with their missionary work wherever we can with transportation, Bibles, literature, picture rolls, nurturing, etc. We are helping a couple church members specifically in their missionary work. One man (brother Nitz) and his family, we are helping especially to be able to spend more time doing missionary work by paying him a full week's wages while he works on our land only 3 days a week. His family has started a new church in a nearby village where many of the baptisms were from. They also come together to meet once a month with the other members at Cabar church. This is the same family that has endured rocks and spears being thrown at them as they do their missionary work. The man that threw the stones at them has just recently killed another man and is now in prison. Pray for this man and Brother Nitz as he plans to visit him in prison soon.

Health workers class
We are also teaching a health workers class to the church members and their older children so they can not only help their neighbors who are desperately needing their help, but they can also know how to better take care of their own families. It's a lot of fun. The class is growing and they are learning to put their skills into practice as patients are also increasing! There are about 12-15 regularly attending even though many of them have to hike for several hours even to get to class!

Sponsored students
Thanks to your support, this church now also has 2 promising students being sponsored to the Adventist Academy a few hours north of here. We see them often on weekends when they come to visit. They are doing very well and getting good grades (despite the financial challenges just to pay for their food and basic needs) and they are very thankful for the great opportunity God has given them.

Standing room only
It's exciting to see the work grow. We smile each time we visit the Cabar church and have to stand or sit on the ground in the back or outside with all the other "old" church members, while the new church members fill the only few wooden "pews" they have in the church.

Learning how to worship
It's so rewarding to see the new believers coming to church with excitement in their eyes. It is also encouraging to watch the "old" church members teaching the new church members in practical ways how to have worship with their families. Even the young teenagers are helping the new members, showing them gently how to pray and sing and read from the Bible.

Praise God for His blessings on this little Cabar church, and on behalf of them, Thank YOU so much for letting God use you to make it happen!

Dwayne and Wendy