Just off the eastern shore of Lake Victoria is a beautiful mountain island called Mfangano. Its been years since I had been there, and the little dirt airstrip hidden in the trees was just as bad as it always was - maybe even worse. I flew the Caravan low southward down the coast to let my passengers do some filming. They were a film crew after all. We then swooped close over the strip and curled back around to land. One huge tree stood at the south end and I maneuvered around it at and angle to the runway, watching my left wing carefully as we zoomed past. The landing was not smooth.. but neither was the runway. My manifest of ten passengers were there for just one day, visiting a Bible translation project which has been going on for more than a decade now. The Suba translation has come a long way since I first saw it six years ago. In fact, they tell me it will soon be finished, in a year or two. I imagine we will be flying for that ocassion - Bible dedications are always a coveted assignment for us pilots. The majority of my passengers today were here to visit and report on the work, as they represented some of the donors for the project. And a handful of them were a film crew that we had flown before - neat guys with really neat cameras. At the start of thier filming day, I could tell they were needing an extra hand. "You guys need a grip?" I asked. Thier eyes lit up. "If you know what a grip is... yeah!" And so, I followed the camera crew around, hauling some of their equipment, and holding the diffuser for each interview. When I'm not occupied with an airplane, playing with cameras is a close second best. And despite the lowly job on this shoot, it was a great opportunity to see how the pros work - frame their shots, conduct the interviews, and talk the talk of super-cool film makers... "Better get a safety on that shot Joe." I flew my airplane well today, helping these folks get the most out of their day, and giving them safe transit over rough country and around some pretty menacing weather. It was a short trip and not much work really, but I knew that I had helped move the Suba Bible a little bit further along, and with it, the growing church on Mfangano. On top of that I had the small joy of knowing that this particular video documentary was going to look real nice, thanks in small (very small) part to those unsung heros of film... the grips.

Occasionally I get on a flight that can be described as, well... easy. Most are fraught with sweat, but some are just plain fun. On Saturday I flew a group out for a short mission trip with New Directions International. At the tail end of their trip, we flew into the Samburu game reserve. I got to visit with them for the overnight, always interested in learning what brings people out to Africa. I especially like to hear about what God did through them, and in them, while on their mission. I also get to tag along on their visits to the game park... which I never tire of. The parks in Kenya are majestic. We only had a couple hours on the short stay to drive through the park here, but a close encounter with a troop of elephants was enough to make the trip worth it. It was dawn (the best time for pictures) and we caught a glimpse of a herd ahead and far off to our right. So we maneuvered the truck so they would pass right by us. They did, a few of the larger females stopping to give us a look (and a warning, presumably) as the baby elephants just trotted on by, playing with the tail of the one in front of them. They continued on to the river for a drink. Here we watched for nearly a half-hour, the moms encircling the babies, and drinking and drinking and drinking. The little ones kept tripping over each-other, and it looked to be intentional. Getting wet from head to toe, wrestling, bumping, splashing. The mom elephants grunted occasionally as if to say "you kids behave" but they tolerated it well enough. As the line of a dozen massive, gentle beasts headed across the river to the other side, the little ones would double back, getting in one more dunk and splash, while being nudged back on course by some of their responsible adults. I laughed because this family of elephants was not too unlike mine - the little ones acting exactly as Amelia and Zach would. I saw tenderness and wisdom in the adults, and just felt joy watching them. I imagined this is the sort of thing God looked upon when he declared his creation "good." In a now dangerous and fallen world, there are still remnants of that good place, if we look for them.

I'm here for a four-day, four thousand mile trip. In a tent tonight - a taught, khaki canvas shelter with a bed and a small desk. I imagine this would be pretty nice accommodation for a British officer or something. For me, it's a seventy-dollar hotel room in a camp right off the airstrip in Rumbek, Sudan. The location is some three hundred miles into southern Sudan and a good middle point to stop between my days of flying. The town has also attracted the United Nations, which means it is fat with ex-patriates and money - hence seventy bucks for a tent in the sand.

I finish my thousand miles of flying today and peal off my flight uniform, soaked with sweat and dust and jet fuel. It lies in a heap next to the bed as I sit two feet in front of an electric fan with only a pair of shorts on, reading. Already five in the afternoon it's still oppressively hot and I can feel heat pulsing off the tent fabric onto my back. The little fan blows a warm breeze, like a cozy space heater, and it only cools me because I've dipped a baseball cap in water and let it drip down my face.

As I read, I remember my physics class, the lesson about the 'latent heat of vaporization'... mentally wondering how many joules I can shed off my body when suddenly the urge for an icy cold Coke overwhelms me and I leave my tent for the bar. Navigating a quarter mile of rock-lined footpaths between tents and landscaped dirt, I make my way to a large tree turned tiki-pub. Around it is a circular countertop, and shoddily nailed to the tree trunk is a shelf decorated with bottles of alcoholic substances. There's a thatch roof above and built around the massive tree. Under it are a couple of Sudanese youth distributing beers and struggling with a cash box overflowing with various currencies - taking payment in dollars and giving change in Dinars or Shillings. I pay a buck fifty for a sip of Coke over ice, and it is like some heavenly elixir, reviving my body almost instantly. I realize that a Coca-Cola will never taste as good as it does right here and right now, after a long day forcibly dehydrated and physically drained in South Sudan. One day I'll be in a Pizza Hut somewhere and wonder what's wrong with the soda, and then I'll remember Sudan.

Since I don't frequent the bar scene very much, I feel a little like a tourist, gawking at the locals and their curious behavior. Big men with big bellies and boisterous mouths charge the bar barking orders at the boys. Everyone seems to need to be served first, given change first, seen and heard first. They are mostly foreigners, Kenyans or Ugandans, but also some fortunate Sudanese. Most of these people are working for some NGO, or the UN if they are lucky. Lord knows what they do. They have meetings about the horrible situation here, and engage in the "work" of managing programs, facilitating something or other, overseeing, monitoring, assessing, doing...nothing. They pull large salaries and make reports. Outside their air-contioned little offices the Sudanese people wither away. Here on the inside, at the bar, they seem to boast their irrelevance. A man leans up against the bar to my right. He has wild eyes and a shirt halfway buttoned, collar up like John Travolta. He's bobbing his head to music only he can hear, and orders a beer without the courtesy of looking at the young boy serving him. He catches my gaze and I look away. As a backdrop to this comedy (or is it a tragedy) are people wandering the dirt paths with Satellite phones in their hands, walking like zombies waiting for a signal. Always looking for a signal so they can talk away at a dollar-fifty a minute about their programs and assessments.

Fifty yards away a satellite linked television broadcasts the BBC nonstop. Dispatches from Sudan report of a Menegitis outbreak, and the latest string of killings in Darfur. The stories are beamed to England, packaged, and then beamed back to Sudan where they came from, broadcast on a TV in the middle of the camp, and ignored.

I finish my Coke but keep the ice and go to sit alone and watch the news. I wonder, hope even, that I am not like these people. I pray that I am doing something relevant here. I shake my head at the global politics parading across the television and thinking about how it is always the little people who get hurt, who bear the brunt of the world's collective selfishness.

There are exceptions of course, little beacons of hope and inspiration. And I guess that's what keeps many of the missionaries out here going. For certain, it keeps me going. I picked up one such exception on Tuesday. When my base in Nairobi called over the HF radio with a request to pick up "Billy" on my way to such and such a place, I got a big smile across my face. I first met him about three years ago, and every meeting since has been bittersweet. It's mostly sweet, except for his unavoidable, bone-crushing handshake. "Billy," I'll say, "How are you doing brother?" and reach out my hand and cringe. I manage to smile through the pain, genuinely happy to see him, and he is nothing but smiles as well. Ol Billy really is old. Seventy something. He should be retired in Florida hitting golf balls, but he's a vagabond missionary instead. Hardened by a military life and tales he cannot tell me from his days in the Special Forces, he's a formidable match for the hardships of living and ministering in South Sudan. Billy's coming to Christ and calling to missions is an amazing story in itself. But the way he's living out his golden years is even more inspirational. Chiseled muscle, balding hair, old folk wrap-around sunglasses, endless energy, a mind for serving God, and a heart for the Dinka people - he wanders the landscape in a white Land Rover with bull horns lashed to the grill. When the truck has a problem, he walks. When he can, he hops a flight on AIM AIR.

I picked yp Billy in Akot, buckled him into the copilots seat so we could chat over the headsets, and ran the preflight checklist. Sitting side by side in the muffled silence before start, sweat literally pouring down our faces, he blurted out a "hallelujah!" I had thought about a lot of things that day so far, frustrations piling up as they tend to do, but I hadn't thought about spilling out a word of praise. Billy never seems to stop doing it. I grin and hit the starter.

On our way he tells me about his work, and how things are going. He's teaching literacy to the Dinka, Sudan's largest ethnic African people group. His text is the Bible translated into their language. Many of the students are Muslims. The Bible, he says, speaks for itself. His ministry is simply to get it into their hands... and enable them them sip it into their hearts. With the country in shambles, the only organized, institutionalized way for Billy to teach his training seminars is through the military. A soldier to the core, this comes naturally to him. I'm flying him to the city where the Sudan People's Liberation Army (the SPLA) has its headquarters. He is planning to find his way to the group commander and have a chat. He expects the commander to assign teachers to learn from under him and then teach the curriculum to the militiamen. He will get what he expects. Billy is fearless. Flying along he pulls out his Bible and presses a strong, crooked finger into the pages of Isaiah as he reads to me line by line. "Go, swift messengers, to a people tall and smooth-skinned, to a people far and wide, an aggressive nation of strange speech, whose land is divided by rivers..." Billy interjects to tell me how this passage is about the land of Cush... modern-day Sudan. He weaves through the text to its ending, "At that time gifts will be brought to the Lord Almighty, from a people tall and smooth-skinned..." Billy believes there will be some kind of revival among the Sudanese, that they will one day honor God in some big way. He tells me how God thinks bigger than we often do. "That's the way God is!" he laughs, and slaps me on the shoulder. "That's the way God is."

Billy may very well be one of those "swift messengers" - certainly swift today as we rocket over the swamplands at a hundred-and-fifty knots. He told me once that he doesn't expect to die here, but that the Lord will be coming back before he's done. I guess that's why his work has a certain urgency about it as he travels around haphazardly, alone and unhindered. It's a joy to find him when I do, and help him along his way. I'd endure that handshake any day for just a few hours at his side. I don't think Billy has ever written a report since he's been out here. He's not assessing anything, just doing. And man, is he making a difference. Billy Sudan - an Army of One.