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Tonight was absolutely spectacular.  This was the sky on the way home from the super-duka.  I rode home as fast as possible and grabbed the real camera. Arianna got the girls and put the homemade chips and guacamole we were going to eat for dinner in tupperware, and we jumped in the car to have a picnic and watch the sunset by the airstrip.

Just before town, on the one 10 yard stretch of good road on our route, the car made a strange noise, as if we had run over something.  Invisible pothole?  A half-mile later, driving through town – thump, tilt, and flop.  Thankfully, and miraculously, we were only going 10 kph because the road is so bad.  Yesterday we had been driving 80 kph on the way back from Nairobi, and if it had happened then, we would have been in serious danger.

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Arianna, our friend Carola who had come along, and the girls walked home to eat dinner on her balcony. I ran to fetch the mechanic just down the road to the amusement of at least 30 onlookers, and soon all was well.  I had met the mechanic a few weeks ago, and one of the first bystanders who stopped to offer help worked at the mechanic shop.  So, we went to get jacks as the sun finally set. They lifted the car, removed the wheel, and discovered the problem was that the bolts that hold the ball-joint on the car had stripped out, fallen-off, and the last one remaining had broken in half.

I wondered how they would tow it, but instead, they borrowed a few bolts from the other side of the car, and popped everything back together, put the wheel on, and drove it back to the shop.  We’ll see what all needs to be fixed tomorrow, but it should hopefully not be much more than replacing things that are at the end of their life already.

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Arianna and I regrouped at another friend’s house an hour later, strangely unfazed.  In the chaos of the night, we saw God’s provision in big and small things once again. We saw the grace given to our family as our girls laughed, going to bed – safe despite a detached wheel in a new country. We were thankful for enough familiarity with town to have friends at the mechanic after only a month here. We were grateful for the wisdom that kept us from needing a tow truck. And strangely, after solving the crisis, stopping in at Mama Chiku’s for a late dinner, and then returning to our house with no more pictures of tonight’s beautiful skies, we felt more at home. There will be more sunsets, more crises, more provision, and more races down the road to see the beauty that surrounds us.

The rubber and metal meets the road

The culprit

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Repair at twilight (from my iPhone)