Engineers? We couldn’t do without them. They build bridges, construct generators, power container-ships and make possible a shift from cars with internal-combustion engines to battery-powered vehicles. Sometimes they make surprising moves from one kind of engineering to another.
Stewart Ayling is one engineer who has made such a switch. Ten years ago he was working with F1 teams taking motor-sport to higher and higher levels of efficiency. Then, at the insistence of his Christian faith he moved from the UK to Africa, from high performance on the tarmac to primitive landing-strips carved out of the jungle, from boundless resources to tight budgets, from acquaintance with circuits in Monaco and Indonesia to isolated offices in thinly populated Tanzania. Instead of putting his engineering skills at the service of big companies competing with each other to go faster, he became part of an organisation flying needy people back and forth in light aircraft in countries where tarmac is in short supply.
Stewart is now putting his engineering expertise to good use in Arusha, a city in Tanzania where the Mission Aviation Fellowship has a base next to an extinct volcano. He is no longer a pure engineer working at a computer screen and dedicating his working life to ever better auto-engineering. He is now doing what needs to be done to keep two of the MAF Cessna fleet busy with their Good Samaritan work in a largely rural nation. That means dealing not just with con-rods and oil-pumps, with pilots and mechanics. It involves Stewart in dealings with bureaucracies, work-permits for pilots, earth-moving equipment that must be hired to set up airstrips and the multifarious chores that have to be attended to if the planes are to fly.
And when he is not dealing with power-cuts, traffic-jams and snarl-ups in Dar-es-Salaam and Dodoma and arranging servicing teams and fuel supplies, Stewart is also working with neighbouring Arusha residents to set up a house-church and give expression to the Christian faith in worship as well as practical service.
Oh, yes, and there is also the little matter of family life. Stewart’s wife Michelle plays her part co-ordinating their kids, helping to tutor some others and assisting in church leadership. Their grown-up family of three has one at university in the UK, another at college in the USA and a third completing her A-levels and pondering where to go for her higher education.
Without the backing of a number of churches in the UK, Stewart would sometimes find the pressure unsustainable. He soldiers on, knowing that MAF has a band of supporters who do their best to share the burden with him.
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