October Update Part 1: Madagascar from Above (flight with Mission Aviation Fellowship)

The blog has been really quiet lately, and I'll give a good update in the next post, but I first I wanted to share some photos of Madagascar (I felt like they deserved a post of their own).

Nick and I have been travelling recently, and we had the awesome opportunity to tag along on a flight with Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF).  MAF is a Christian missionary organization which uses small planes to provide a really wide variety of services, whether it's getting relief sent to difficult to reach places or partnering with other organisations to fly their staff where they need to go.  Madagascar is huge island with some very difficult to reach areas, and so Mercy Ships has partnered with MAF to help get our patient selection team out to less visited areas to look for potential patients.  
It happened that they had a few extra seats on a flight returning from Tamatave to their base in the capitol, which meant we got to skip out on the 8-10 hour bus ride! :) 

Not only did we get to skip out on the winding bus ride through the mountains- we got to see how stunning Madagascar is from above!

Here's a few photos:


We could see the port out the window, and even the Africa Mercy!

Houses in Tamatave...

Rice paddies and rivers just outside the city

We saw lots of mountains with rice paddies, fields and villages tucked between them

Many thanks to our friendly pilot!

Thank you MAF for such a cool experience!