St. Michael Missions Trip Pt. 12 MARC

One of the great advantages we enjoyed on this missions trip was the services of MARC. Mission Aviation Repair Center in long form. This ministry operates to serve mission stations all over Alaska regardless of affiliation. If you know anything about Alaska, you know that only a very small percentage of our communities are served by road access. You simply cannot drive to most communities in Alaska. So, the aircraft is a vital link in transportation. This is where MARC comes in. Lets say, a team of people want to go to St. Michael to do some work on the facilities there and they need to take a lot of stuff with them. Since there are no commercial air carriers who fly into St. Michael, there would have to be a more complicated and expensive route to get there. MARC will fly such a team directly to any destination with their stuff. It is a huge advantage.

MARC was a fairly small operation for many years, begun in the earlier era of less regulations and red tape by an incredible man, Rold Amundsen. They used their personal aircraft to fly missionaries back and forth, supplies, groceries and the like with the meager funds that were available. But it worked and the ministry kept going. Eventually they added missionary pilots, mechanics and office personnel who were supported by outside churches and missions agencies. The real boost came fairly recently from the organization Samaritan's Purse, led by Franklin Graham.
Franklin has a great interest in Alaska and comes to our town often. Samaritan's Purse has done a lot of work in the Alaska Villages. Perhaps the most significant was Hooper Bay. A couple of years ago the village suffered a catastrophic fire that burned several houses and buildings in the village. You don't just go to Home Depot and get some lumber and start rebuilding. It is a huge effort. A village that suffers such a blow as that can simply cease to exist because the logistics of rebuilding are so great. Samaritan's Purse spearheaded the effort to get teams of people and materials out to Hooper Bay. It must have cost millions of dollars to do what they did. Much of it was run through MARC. Because of this relationship between MARC and Samaritan's Purse, MARC is able to use the aircraft of Samaritan's Purse for other missions efforts such as ours.
What you are able to load on these aircraft is pretty incredible. Essentially if you can fit it in the door, it goes. Weight of course is of great concern so other things get limited. For instance Dennis, our team leader limited us to a total of 25 pounds of personal gear per person. That 25 pounds included our sleeping bag, pillow and foam pad - if you wanted to bring such things. Yes, I did. I told Dennis that I have lost 30 pounds since the first of the year so I could then take 55 pounds? No dice. I didn't tell him but my stuff actually weighed 26 pounds altogether. I got away with it! Ha! Anyway, we were loaded pretty heavy.

Back to the great advantage MARC affords us is we are able to "piggy back" on trips they are already scheduled to take. In our case, the large aircraft we took was scheduled to deliver goods to White Mountain which is much further North than St. Michael. So, we piggy backed on the return route as the aircraft was empty. We only had to pay for the return leg, not a whole round trip to pick us up. The same with the smaller aircraft on the way out. It was already scheduled to fly into Hooper Bay which is not far from St. Michael (relatively speaking). So we only had to pay the
leg from Hooper Bay to St. Michael, only one hour instead of the whole round trip. Also, the flights are direct instead of having to change out planes to go from one place to another. It's really the only way to fly. My pilot, Brian was a great guy, we had great fellowship on the way stopping in Napakiak (Na pok iak), Bethel, Hooper Bay and St. Michael. What a great adventure!