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MidWest
Missionair, Inc. was born in January 1996 when
Steve Latham and Gordon Blackie volunteered to help Missionair of
Jacksonville, Florida carry freight to Haiti in their DC-3. At that time both men caught the vision of
providing a means for volunteers to get to the mission field and set a goal
to establish, in the middle of the country, an operation similar to the one
in Florida. . |
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And in
February 2003 the final crew training flight was made by Bev MacCallum, Jerry
Brockhaus, and Gordon Blackie to Central America making both the aircraft and
the crew ready to carry out short term mission trips. |
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November
2001 a Piper Aztec was purchased from
Agape Flights, Inc, of Sarasota, Florida. Agape
provides aviation services to missionaries in Haiti and the Dominican
Republic. They had outgrown the Aztec
and had replaced it with a larger aircraft. In
January 2002 our new airplane was brought home to Kansas. The year 2002 was spent training pilots and
refurbishing the aircraft in preparation for flights to the mission field. |
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In those
days, many new contacts were made with missionaries. Steadily we tapped into a network and
learned how God uses this network to direct his servants. Missions in Central America is carried on
by many small independent agencies.
Each concentrates on its own specialty and yet there is a coordination
of their efforts that can only be attributed to the hand of God. It became
clear to us that we should not try to be all things to all men but
instead MidWest
Missionair
should concentrate on what we do best and take our place in that network. On Oct 7,
1998, Midwest Missionair, Inc. officially organized as a 501c(3) non profit corporation in the
State of Kansas with the goal of originating short term mission projects in
the mid west. |
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Several years were spent organizing
projects through the group in Florida in order to learn how to set up a
similar group in Kansas. Dr. Rob
Helmer, president of Missionair in Florida,
was very supportive and provided much help and encouragement to us. |
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MidWest Missionair’s first projects were directed at
evangelism. In those days “The Jesus
Film” was new to Central America and most of our efforts revolved around
showing the film in remote areas of Honduras.
During the day we did small repair projects for missionaries and
participated in feeding hungry children who lived at the city dump. |