NAMPA — Mission Aviation Fellowship is helping earthquake and tsunami victims in Indonesia. The disaster struck on Sept. 28, 2018, and has killed more than 1,400 people.
Mission Aviation Fellowship, or MAF, has put together a team operating two airplanes and one helicopter to help in relief efforts.
The U.S. headquarters for the Christian non-profit organization is in Nampa. We talked with the Global Director of Disaster Response, John Woodberry. He says their team arrived on Sulawesi Island in Indonesia on Tuesday.
"In some areas, just a gigantic scale of destruction and buildings, roads cut off, where other areas were not as bad as they thought," said Woodberry.
He says some of the first flights were to evacuate school children in Palu and bring them back to their village homes. He says the kids had been waiting at the hangar, hungry for a couple of days before MAF even got there.
Since a lot of communication infrastructure has been damaged by the 7.4 magnitude earthquake, MAF set up a communication system at the Palu airport. The system allows aid agencies to communicate with their teams in other places. Woodberry says the next focus is to bring in medical aid workers. He's not sure how long MAF will be there helping relief efforts.
"In disaster response, you're making decisions in the fog of the unknown," said Woodberry. "What we do is remote and isolated support, communications, logistics, and so sometimes it's hard to answer that question. We're estimating we're going to be their six weeks, but it really depends on the need of what we do. If that need goes away we'll go back to other urgent stuff we're involved in."
Woodberry says on average MAF responds to four or five natural disasters every year. It has a global fleet of 128 airplanes. There are actually seven bases across the vast island nation of Indonesia. Woodberry says it's helpful MAF has personnel in Indonesia who know the local language and culture. He says it allows them to work more effectively so those who need help get it sooner.
MAF receives the majority of its funding from donors who support its mission. If you would like to help click here.