Meet my brother, Jon.
A month ago, Jon - and his wife, Angela, and their five great kids - packed up their belongings and moved to Dili, East Timor, where Jon flies Supply and Medevac flights to and from remote villages.
(Alright, I suppose you could say his job is ever so slightly more important than mine).
I managed to persuade him to join Tumblr before he left, and today he posted his first entry from ‘the field’, a really interesting glimpse into his life there:
… Thankfully, I have a mattress folded up in the rear of the plane in case of unexpected Medevac calls. Francisco carries it off, and returns a few minutes later for me. We walk a few hundred meters to his house, which is an approximately 6m square tin roofed and split wood walled hut with a dividing wall down the middle. This is home for Francisco and his wife and 4 boys…
I need to ask where the toilet is, but they don’t understand my attempts to ask. Its not something i want to act out like charades for them to guess what I’m trying to say. After a while I find another word, and they suddenly understand. I am led through the back yard to a bamboo walled enclosure, and inside is a hole in the ground with 4 bricks marking the edges. I am sent in with a bottle of water and a plastic bucket. There is no such thing as toilet paper.
You can read all about it at his appropriately-punny Tumblr, Flying Lowe.
