Our Little Car

So, what do a small stick, a metal bolt and electrical tape have in common? They were all used last Saturday to fix our car on the side of the road. Matt, Gayle, Bonaventure (ESK headmaster) and I had gone into town to pick up Bonaventure's wife from a women's meeting and get some things from the market. As we left the church where the women had been meeting, Matt all of a sudden couldn't put the car in gear while the engine was on. After spending several minutes trying to figure out how to release the hood, he was able to take a look at the engine. Matt discovered that the clutch cable had broken in the past and been repaired with a piece of rubber that had broken off due to the heat of the engine. He determined that he could temporarily fix the cable by attaching something stiff to it using electrical tape. Unfortunately there was no tape in the car, so we sent Bonaventure off on a taxi bike to buy some. He came back just as it was beginning to downpour. Matt had to pay a young man about 25 cents to hold his umbrella while he taped a stick and a mettle bolt to the cable. The fix worked and we were able to finish our trip to the market and return to Kidaho without further mishap.

A little background on the car:
It is a Suzuki that Dave bought for us last fall. Some money had been raised to buy the Thomases a new car, but instead they decided to rebuild their engine and use some of the left over money to buy a car for us, the English teachers. Dave spent some time looking for a something that was in his price range and that could handle the road between Kidaho and Butaro, which is a very bumpy dirt road. He finally found this car. It didn't look like much on the outside, but when he had a mechanic look at the engine, he decided that with a little bit of work it could be a good car for us. It ended up taking three weeks of work -- some body work, a new paint job, some work underneath, and fixing the electric windows. Luckily there was a church worker who was able to accompany the car to the mechanic and make sure that they did the work well. The weekend after I arrived in December, the car work was finished (for the time being), and at my first team meeting I was brought out to see my "present" which had decorated by the Thomas children, and I was given a set of car keys.

Having a car opened up a new possibilities. However, this included driving in the midst of Kigali traffic, stopping and starting on the 1000 hills of Rwanda, and doing my best to remember after 7 years of driving an automatic how to drive a manual car. So you can imagine that I was a little hesitant at first to drive my new car much.

I drove the car for the first time in December during the 4 hour trip up to Butaro. Half of the way the car was packed with 5 full-grown -- three church leaders and Brad sat in the seats, and Dave sat in the back "trunk" area. I managed to miss the many pedestrians, motorcycles, bicycles and other vehicles that crammed the roads, and, for the last 50 minutes, I successfully navigated the dirt road from Kidaho to Butaro without mishap. However, I was pretty tired and happy to turn the keys over to Brad for the return trip to Kigali.

My second trip was into Kigali town center. During that trip I locked the keys in the car, but was able to pay someone $2 to get them out for me. In the process I discovered that the car is not that difficult to break into.

Since then I have driven the car many times with only minor problems. We are hoping that it will provide at least two years of somewhat reliable transportation for the Denhams and I and that when something does go wrong it can be easily fixed (perhaps with just a stick, a bolt and some tape).