Except for the burglaries, Land Rover crash, airplane crash, typhoid fever, a murder and getting kicked out of our rental house, bush-flying for MAF in Colombia was great..

Within a few weeks after checkout, I was flying solo into the small bush airstrips located all around Montería. Muleticos had a hill at one end, making it a one-way strip―you could only land to the west and only take off to the east. This day I’d just cleared the boundary fence when two pigs breached the fencing and darted across the runway. Too late to go around. I touched down and stood on the brakes. Bam bam! I hit both of them with the left wheel, knocking out the left brake. At that point I could keep the airplane straight or brake to a stop, but I couldn’t do both. The plane swerved violently to the right, took out some fenceposts and came to rest after severing a six-inch tree trunk, throwing the airplane down on its left wing. Thankfully no one was hurt. After we traveled several hours by mule and jeep over dirt roads, I arrived home tired, dirty and discouraged. I collapsed into Barbara’s arms―“I crashed the airplane!”

“I’m so thankful no one was hurt!” she said The next day, I and Bill, the other pilot, returned to Muleticos. We spent three nights eating the rural food and drinking the water. Bill used a piece of hardwood to patch the aluminum strut and used bolts to reattach the left landing gear to the plane. The propeller was a full inch out of track but Bill decided to fly it out anyway. I opted to travel home again by mule.

Two days after returning home, I developed a high fever. The fever would rise, then break suddenly leaving me shivering in a cold sweat. After an hour it would start to rise again and the cycle would repeat. Had I picked up something on our overnights in Muleticos? I thought I had malaria but the doctor diagnosed it as typhoid fever. I was in bed for a month.

We lived in a rented house, prepaid for a year. One day two guys with a typewriter sat on our front porch and announced they were going to embargar the house. Turns out the homeowner wasn’t paying his mortgage so the bank was going to repossess the house and kick us out. We lost all our prepaid rent.

Barbara single-handedly found another rental home in a fairly affluent suburb. We moved. Early one morning Kimberly (our three years old who we had adopted in Costa Rica) came into our bedroom trembling, just as Barbara and I were waking up. “Mommy; who cut my screen?” I jumped up and went over to discover the cut screen frame sitting on the bedroom floor. Some of the jalousie windowpanes were removed. There were bars on the window but now two were pried apart. Easy to see that someone had broken in during the night. Timothy was still asleep in the bedroom. Thankfully neither woke up when the intruder was inside the house.

I walked out to the dining room and discovered our tape player was missing. And the typewriter. Someone (had they used a child?) had squeezed between the bars, stolen the stuff and exited through the front door. “Well, there’s two things we won’t have to pack when we travel back to the States,” I told Barbara. We were happy neither child had woken up during the burglary—Jeny, our third child was an infant and was sleeping in her crib in another room. I could see the fear in Barbara’s eyes, fear for herself and for her children’s trauma.  

This wasn’t the only time we were robbed. A few months later we were in Bogotá when a guy ripped my watch off my wrist. I turned to chase him but the knife in his hand made me abandon the chase. Later, at a park, someone else stole money out of Barbara’s purse. Back in Montería, a thief pulled up decorative shrubs in our front lawn and someone else stole a large can of weedkiller out of our Land Rover. We felt vulnerable, even at home.

A few months later, I was flying the mission plane back to Montería when the control tower operator called me―“Capitán, your wife and kids were in a car accident!” I I landed, jumped on the mission motorcycle and raced over to the accident site. A loaded dump truck had lost its brakes and slammed into the left rear side of the Land Rover, narrowly missing a fifty-five-gallon drum of aviation fuel sitting in the rear of the truck. Barbara was in tears, feeling the danger to herself and to the kids. If the truck had hit just a couple of feet to the right, the fuel drum could have exploded and killed them all.

Another night we awoke to the sound of gunshots. They seemed to be coming from the house behind us. A woman screamed, “Jairo; Jairo!” Then more gunshots. Then we heard someone running down a narrow passageway outside our bedroom. They jumped into a car in front of our house and drove away. We later learned that “Jairo” had murdered his wife whom he’d caught with another man.

Was Colombia a terrible mistake? Robberies, airplane accident, car accident, typhoid fever—Colombia seemed to be conspiring against us the whole time we were there. And yet, Colombia gave us two precious adopted infants—Timothy, and later, Jeny. We have much to be grateful for. Who can discern God’s plans for our lives? “We trust in thee whate’er befall . . .”