25041: Hermantin(News)Missionary pilot's job one of faith for his faith (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Mon, May. 09, 2005


HAITI
Missionary pilot's job one of faith for his faith
Flying in rural Haiti does require some faith: There are mountains, no
radar, few lights and unpaved runways. But for missionary pilot David
Carwell, it's all part of doing God's work.
BY JOE MOZINGO
jmozingo@herald.com

HINCHE, Haiti - Every weekday, the missionary pilot from Illinois flies his
Cessna 206 straight into the isolated center of a nation his employer says
is dedicated to Satan.

Sometimes he says a prayer on the runway. Other times this scares his
passengers -- as if he'd blurted something like ''Jesus is my mechanic''
before takeoff -- so he keeps it to himself.

'They say, `Why do you need to pray?' '' said David Carwell, 39, the pilot
for Mission Aviation Fellowship, or MAF. ``Well, I don't need to pray.''

But flying in rural Haiti does require some faith -- with cloud-shrouded
mountains, no radar, few lights and runways that double as goat pastures,
soccer fields and donkey thoroughfares.

MAF is the one outfit, beyond the Colombian drug cartels that regularly use
Haiti to transship cocaine, that dares to do it every day.

The California-based, nonprofit airline is devoted to delivering
missionaries and the Gospel to remote places around the world.

It also doubles as a domestic air carrier in this Caribbean nation. For a
modest fee of $30, the company takes everyday Haitians, journalists, aid
workers, atheists, whoever needs to go, although booking a flight on the
company's website might be off-putting for some.

''A spirit of evil permeating every level of society'' isn't the type of
travel warning normally found on Orbitz.

PREACHING THE GOSPEL

Those who complain can take the back-breaking, eight-hour bus ride back from
Hinche to Port-au-Prince. MAF has many like-minded missionaries to keep its
two planes in the air.

With Haiti's deplorable living conditions and its mix of Roman Catholicism
and Vodou, which some foreigners consider witchcraft, ministering here has
become a crusade for untold thousands of Christian missionaries from around
the world, ever since the first American Baptists landed here in 1804.

MAF says the country was ''first dedicated to Satan'' in 1791, when the
leader of a slave revolt is said to have made a pact with Vodou spirits for
Haiti's independence from France.

The group says the country renewed its vows to the Devil in 1991, the year
now-ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former Catholic priest who is
said to have embraced Vodou, was inaugurated.

Some of MAF's passengers come to preach the gospel and root out Vodou. Some
run orphanages or medical clinics or schools. Others do both.

And in a country of few roads, many rely on Carwell to get them into the
field -- or evacuate them during political upheaval and medical emergencies.

His main daily flight is from the capital of Port-au-Prince to this city 70
miles north in the Central Plateau, the biggest in Haiti's interior. The
only road between the two cities snakes along high, crumbling cliffs in a
blaze of white dust and hurtling gravel trucks. It is a terrifying,
hourslong journey that carries a high risk of a blown vertebra or loss of
bladder control.

In Carwell's six-seat Cessna, it takes about 30 minutes.

Because getting anywhere in Haiti is so difficult, there is a sense of
exhilaration swooping out of the capital with such ease -- rising above the
squalor, staring down at the scrap-yard shanties, the sloops on the bay, the
fetid mud flats, the vast gray city of cinder block piling into the
mountains.

''The day you don't enjoy flying is the day you stop,'' Carwell said. ``I
feel like God calls me here.''

On a recent hazy morning, he banks north across the valley toward the
interior. The Haiti he loves quickly emerges, ravaged and yet still
beautiful. He tops mountains scraped clean of forest and soil, their inner
strata exposed like bones. Peasants' cisterns glimmer like swimming pools
from miles away. Blue ribbons of smoke unravel into the pale sky.

There are no roads, just well-worn footpaths between thatched huts and
hamlets and clusters of fruit trees.

Carwell has wanted to fly such terrain since he was young. ''I read a book
called Jungle Pilot about bush flying and here I am,'' he said.

Bookish and quiet, neither renegade bush pilot nor fiery preacher, Carwell
joined MAF in Haiti in 1993.

The group was founded by three World War II pilots in 1945, with the goal of
bringing the Gospel to isolated peoples like the Miskito Indians of Honduras
or the headhunters of New Guinea. Now, funded mostly by private donors, MAF
flies 56 planes in 16 countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

Haiti has been a tough market. The group couldn't get into the country until
the 29-year Duvalier family dictatorship ended in 1986. And then, the
operation had to persevere through military coups, a U.S. invasion, a
crippling fuel embargo and the revolt last year that toppled Aristide.

And the lack of radar. In such difficult terrain, with U.N. helicopters and
drug runners flying irregular routes, controllers don't know where anybody
is.

A TRICKY LANDING

And the runway obstacles. Hinche has the most. Its dirt strip cuts through
the center of town.

MAF had to hire two kids on bicycles to whistle people and livestock away.

As Carwell approaches on the recent morning, the whistlers are whistling. A
truck moves off the end of the landing strip in a cloud of dust. A woman
with a basket on her head scurries across.

There are so many people milling about, it's like a landing in a flea
market.

Nearing the critical moment, a man saunters up into the bull's eye of
Carwell's propeller. The plane is still descending. Luckily, the man hears
it, turns and races back to the side. Pigs and goats get wise only at the
last second.

Carwell touches down smoothly and glides to a stop.

So far, MAF only had a couple minor collisions here. ''In Haiti, we've hit
two goats,'' he said.