The first time I met American humanitarian missionary Dave Eubank was in 2004 over breakfast in Chiang Mai, where we discussed mules, powered flight and civil war in Myanmar. Desmond Ball, the late professor of the Australian National University, had introduced us, and for an avowed atheist, Des took Dave’s energetic Christian speech in his stride; it was all about the conflict and what they were both doing, in very different ways, to alleviate the suffering of civilians.

Eubank told me that just that day he had ordered two powered paragliders, or paramotoring devices—simply a propeller strapped to your back that blows wind into a parachute—to evacuate landmine victims over the mountains in eastern Myanmar into Thailand. That mules could move supplies through jungle terrain, he had gleaned from reading Bernard Ferguson’s classic memoirs of the World War II Chindit expeditions, The Wild Green Earth, so he got several of them too.

• Tags: Brent Gudgel, Chris Sinclair, David Scott Mathieson, Issue 19, Myanmar