Those of you who know me, know that I’m not much of a country music fan. Arlen is, but I’m not. Do you know what you get when you play country music backwards? You get your dog back, you get your husband/wife back, you get your car back…

Upon returning from the States January, we hit the ground running. Arlen made a three day turn around and off he went to Nicaragua for an MV Regional Conference. When he returned from that was the fateful trip we took off the side of the road when the drunk guy in the pick-up behind us didn’t slow down for the speed bump like we did! We were OK, but our car was not. Cosmetic damage was estimated at about $1000 but it didn’t start and we didn’t know why.


That's where we went over the edge -- it was so steep that we grabbed hold of the weeds to 'climb' up the bank.


Virgil took initiative to go out there and paint that speed bump, to make it more visible. Several team members went with us. We had a good time. The two speed bumps on either side of that curve have since been completely removed because of the high incidence of accidents.

It wasn’t the only vehicle around here that wasn’t starting. The Sprinter (16 pax ministry van) had decided it didn’t want to start way back in November in the middle of a team trip. We exhausted our local mechanic’s talent trying to figure it out. We managed to jump-start it to take it to Guat City, when we were flying north for Christmas, but ended up towing it back home when it stalled 45 minutes away from home and refused to start again. So there they sat… the Sprinter and the Grand Vitara… in the carport. Neither of them going anywhere without some major help. It was a sad sight. We had to put rat poison in the van to prevent the rodents from making their nest under the hood!

We ordered a plug for a code reader for the van — from Hong Kong — we were certain it was an electronic problem. We waited a couple months for that to arrive.

It’s interesting to note that I don’t have ANY pictures of the hours the local mechanic spent on the van, no pics of the Suzuki’s banged up backside or the process of towing the Suzuki 10 hours to Guat City – with the truck and the whole family along. Kinda like the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs that totally omit the traumatic saga of the exodus of the Hebrew nation of slaves.

Yea, we decided to tow the Grand Vitara to Guat City when we headed in there for a conference in February. A trusted mechanic friend there dropped the motor and found more damage than we dreamed of. It was a sad sight. We found a used motor and completely replaced it. Thank God that was done within a few weeks—when Arlen went to Guat City for a one-day conference the middle of March, he was able to drive it home.

Then, we spent a day over Easter weekend with some friends from San Benito. It ‘just so happened’ that Franklin is a very knowledgeable mechanic and Arlen told him about the van’s problem. He had the code reader we had been looking for, so a week or two later when the plug arrived, Arlen towed the van out to see him. That wasn’t without incident, either… when Arlen turned left out of the driveway, the van was too heavy for the bolts on the tow-bar and the van went straight across the road and down the bank on the other side, taking out a couple of the neighbor’s fence posts! It’s times like these when it’s nice to have a backhoe nearby! Franklin had the van’s problem diagnosed and fixed within a week.

And, PTL, we've got the van back, we've got the car back...