Nunpitchuk village visit to learn from them and teach about Jesus: Beginning the Journey!

To begin with: Sorry about the mis-spelling of Nunapitchuk on the title. I cannot seem to figure out how to change this so you and I have to deal with this!!

ONWARD!!!

Well 10 of us begin our trek to Nunapitchuk to learn and to help others understand the love of Jesus.

Our group from left to right are:

Back row: Joe, Collin, Holli, Lisa, Lynn, and Dave

Front row: Me, David, Karen, and Gayle

This years theme is based off Matthew 5:16 Shine Your Light!

We began with a sending service at Anchorage Lutheran Church where the people gathered there gathered around the team and prayed for them and blessed them. Anchorage Lutheran has sent teams for the last 7 years. Many friendships have been forged and we are glad to be a part of the team this year. As you can tell the shirt color for this year is orange!! Hard to get lost and we do stand out.

We departed Anchorage via Alaska Airlines and arrived in the town of Bethel 58 minutes later. Not a long flight but we covered 400 miles and Bethel is not accessible by road. The plane seated about 90 people and was a full flight. We took over 30 pieces of luggage with us. My wife always said I was a clothing horse which is not true as David and my clothes fit into the black and blue backpack in the bottom left hand corner of the luggage pile photo. Things out this way are moved mainly by totes. While we were waiting in Bethel for the van to take us and our luggage/ totes to the hanger where we would board the "small plane" I noticed everyone in the claim area had totes galore! They drill holes in the totes and zip tie them shut. Of course the TSA then comes along and cut off the zip ties to inspect them and re-ties them back up for us after depositing a nice card saying "we rifled through your stuff and you are ok!" Our totes contained food for the week, gifts for people in the village, bike parts and Vacation Bible School materials. What we do not use will be left behind for those who live here to use as they see fit.

The Tundra!

Unloaded at Bethel

Below is a Alaska map and you can see Bethel just lower left of the center of the map.

From there we hopped a charter flight in the small plane (see photo). The "low ceiling" decal on the roof is no joke! It is so small I had to go outside to change my mind but it was a fun flight! 12 minutes later we were circling the village of Nunapitchuk. The airport landing strip is gravel. All the gravel was brought in by the river system on barges. There is no place to get gravel as this is the tundra of Alaska. This was a costly expenditure but has helped not just this community but surrounding ones as well. While we were waiting for the boats to come up river to pick us up and take us to the town two boats showed up with a person who was injured and needed to be flown to likely Anchorage for treatment.

The Hanger out of Bethel. You might have heard of ERA "Flying Wild Alaska: The Tweto's. Well they were no where to be seen but we did fly out on their ERA planes!

The village of Nunapitchuk

George Andrews one of the village Elders meets us at the landing strip with his boat and more help on the way.

The 2nd of 3 boats that came to take us up stream to the village.

Trying to stay out of the pilot's way as his plane came with most of our baggage about 20 minutes after we arrived at the landing strip in Nunapitchuk.