Harvest Dinner Story #2

On Saturday night, we were at Hillcrest Baptist Church for the Harvest Dinner. We told this story as part of our presentation:

It was one of the first showers of the rainy season in April 2008. That morning I had trudged along the path to the clinic in my rubber boots, enjoying the refreshing light drizzle and surveying the bright green shoots of grass pushing their way out of the parched brown earth. I inhaled the refreshing cool breeze, wondering when the heavy downpour would begin.

Back on the SIM compound, 2 of my teammates busied themselves with final preparations for a trip south, to Kenya, for some rest from their work and the difficult conditions in South Sudan. The airplane was expected in the mid-morning—a pilot and 2 ladies from a different SIM base along the Nile were due to come and pick up my teammates. We looked at the gray clouds and wet conditions with uncertainty. But the pilot had planned ahead, left early, and was able to safely land on our dirt airstrip at around 9 am.

After they landed, the rain gradually became heavier and they spent the morning on our compound waiting for a break in the weather. By 11 am the rain let up a bit and the pilot went out to assess the condition of the airstrip, deciding it was safe to take off. He and the 4 ladies packed their bags in the single engine aircraft and prepared to leave.

At lunch time, the clinic staff returned to the compound to eat and as we were loading up our plates with rice and beans, we heard the familiar roar of the engine as the plane taxied down the runway a short distance from the compound. All of a sudden, we heard a strange thud and all was eerily silent. Vicki, one of my teammates, came frantically running toward the dining hall shouting, “The plane’s down!” My heart sank into my stomach, fearing the worst. I grabbed Vicki by the arm and together we raced toward the airstrip, crying and whimpering “Lord, please, no!” By this time, the rain was falling quite steadily and the black cotton soil between the compound and the airstrip was becoming very slippery. We held onto each other for comfort and balance as we slowly inched our way to where the plane had fallen.

The whole village was converging on the plane—people running from every direction in the rain. The wife of a church elder caught up with us and grabbed Vicki’s other arm, helping to steady us. The fear in her eyes was the same as in ours. “Juang magde!” she whispered in the local language. “God will heal!” We still couldn’t see the plane, until we climbed a small hill. There it was, completely upside down in a clearing, the wings hanging precariously off, a total shambles. Several villagers and missionaries were removing bodies from the plane. I burst into tears as we ran the rest of the way. “They must be dead—there’s no way they could have survived this!” I thought.

The next several hours are a bit of a blur now. The rain continued to fall as we worked together to help the pilot and 4 women. Men carried traditional Sudanese beds to use as stretchers to carry the ladies through the mud back to the compound. People huddled around, trying to help in whatever way they could. As a team, we rushed from pilot to passenger, taking vital signs, giving pain killers and IV fluids, offering words of comfort and praying with them.

The Lord provided help through a friend in the United Nations later in the day. A UN helicopter arrived to take the wounded to a hospital in the state capital for initial treatment. The next day they were transferred to Kenya to receive further care.

Miraculously, all survived! The pilot and one lady had some broken bones. Another had severe soft tissue injuries to her neck and shoulders and needed physical therapy for several months. The other 2 had head injuries—one suffered from dizziness and headaches for a while and the other felt very grateful that the only lasting effect was that she could remember nothing of the incident at all!
You’re probably wondering what had caused the plane to crash. Most of the airstrip was safe to take off from but there was a soft wet patch towards the end and we believe it slowed the plane right at take-off, so that it couldn’t reach critical flying speed. We never heard the final report about technical aspects involving the aircraft itself.

These are the obvious causes but as the Sudanese help to remind us, there are always things going on in the unseen realm that we may not be aware of. After the crash I heard a rumor that some had seen a mysterious woman dressed in black dancing around the crash site. Was she a witchdoctor who had placed a curse on the airplane? Or was she simply one of the crowd, wailing and mourning for the pain of the passengers? We’ll probably never know but we do know there is a lot of spiritual bondage related to witchcraft in the area. At one point, just after the plane crashed, the ladies were suspended upside down in the plane, hanging from their seat belts. One of them was stuck and couldn’t get out. A large Sudanese man appeared and cut her seatbelt, gently lowering her to the ground. No one knows who he was. Maybe he was a villager who arrived early on the scene. Some have speculated that he was actually an angel.

What is certain to us is that the Lord protected and spared the lives of the pilot and 4 passengers on that rainy April day. As we surveyed the crash scene, neither missionary nor Sudanese villager could deny the hand of God in our midst. We praised the Lord—we had seen a miracle.