Wings of mercy: Missionary pilots stop in Le Mars

(Sentinel photo by Magdalene Landegent) Dave Rask, left, and Jason Risser, both with Mission Aviation Fellowship, talk about their flight to Le Mars in a new Kodiak plane while it is being refueled. Rask and his wife Crissie, a Le Mars native, have served with MAF for years and lived for part of the time in Indonesia, where Rask landed small planes in hard-to-get-to places. [Click to enlarge]

But the missionary pilot has landed on airstrips before where the possibility of a pig running out from the bushes posed a very real threat.

Rask and his wife, Crissie, a Le Mars native, served as missionaries in Indonesia for years.

Now they are based in Nampa, Idaho, at the headquarters for Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF), a Christian mission organization that helps other Christian and humanitarian groups through flying and global communications.

Rask, MAF's director of aviation, flew into Le Mars with Jason Risser, a flight instructor at MAF, to visit Rask's mother-in-law Phyliss Masters, of Le Mars, and members of the Le Mars Bible Church, which supports him and Crissie.

The stopover was part of a longer tour to introduce MAF's newest style of plane for mission work: a Kodiak.

The Kodiak, Risser explained, seats 10 people unlike the plane it will likely replace, the Cesna 206, which seats six. Also, Kodiaks burn jet fuel rather than Avgas, a harder-to-buy fuel when in remote countries.

"One of these is on its way to Paupa New Guinea in Indonesia," Risser said.

MAF has planes around the globe -- Africa, South and Central America, Asia.

In Indonesia, Rask flew to places that only had access by foot or by airplane, serving the church and helping with community development.

"We would fly in pastors or evangelists, and we flew in supplies like roofing and nails to build a church," Rask said. "We helped out clinics and schools, bringing teachers in and out, bringing rice for their food."

Recently, MAF's humanitarian efforts have included flying in relief workers after a 7.6 magnitude earthquake rocked Indonesia this month.

"In places where transportation is a real challenge -- where you could walk in, maybe ride a horse, or take a canoe along a treacherous course for weeks -- we can get there in a half hour in an airplane, and it's safer," Risser said.

But that doesn't mean there will be a paved runway when pilots arrive.

Grass or dirt runways were the norm in Rask's experience.

"These airstrips are made by people with wheelbarrows and shovels, carved out of the jungle," he said. "Sometime there was a fence around the airstrip to keep pigs off."

Rask, who's been with MAF for 28 years, said he'd never been in a small airplane before training with the organization, but felt God was calling him to serve there. Since then, it's been an adventure for him and Crissie.

"We've been some pretty unusual places," Rask said.