A Man’s Blog

Bro Ebere is my mechanic and this is his shop. He is in the Branch Presidency and speaks English.   My truck was making a terrible noise and he found out there was a loose part on the air filter box.  He heated up a wire with a torch and pushed a hole in it to put a screw in to hold it tight.  It fixed the rattle.


There are many cars in various stages of disrepair.  He dropped everything to work on my truck.  As I walked around, his yard looked like a salvage yard in the US and none of the vehicles would have been thought worth repairing, but he will fix them.

Brother Ebere is building a home on the corner of the lot where his car repair business is.  It will be nice when he gets it finished and he will be closer to his family when he works.  I haven’t seen the home he is living in now.

We took a taxi across town to get the parts we needed to replace the clutch on the truck and I took some photos as we were riding in the taxi.  This is a portable plumbing shop that sells all kinds of plumbing repair parts.  It is pushed around town by the owner.

The store on the right is a plumbing store.  Notice the sinks hanging and the pipe in the roll.

This is another plumbing cart.  It is a little blurry, because we were driving by pretty fast and the road was very rough.

This is a large building under construction.  They pour cement collums and then fill in the rest with home made cinderblocks.  We pray that they never have an earthquake here.  It takes years for anything to be completed and often they get to this stage and then the owner runs out of money and they just sit for years.

Brother Ebere and his helper are putting a new clutch in our truck.  For those of you not mechanically minded, that means they have to take out the drive shaft, and the transmission to get to the clutch.  In the US they would put it on a hoist and stand under to do the work.  Here they raised up the front a few inches and put some old engine blocks under to support it and then lay underneath on some cardboard and drop everything to the ground.  I watched the whole process and was amazed what they can do with a sack of tools.  They didn’t even have sockets and of course no air tools.

This is the waiting room.  I would watch out in the sun until I got too hot and then I would sit on these old car seats and study my French.  It took about 6 hours for them to change the clutch. 

In the taxi on the way to buy the new clutch, I saw this guy on the back of a mototaxi with two weed eaters up in the air.  They do all the trimming along the side of the roads with weed eaters.  I was expecting him to hit a low wire and to come rolling off the moto.

There are thousands of old abandoned vehicles along the roads.  They drive them until they stop and then a mechanic comes with his little bag of tools and rebuilds the engine or transmission or puts the front end back on.  He does it where ever it dies.  I asked my mechanic about preventative maintenance and he laughed at me.

On our trip to Yaounde, a city 4 hours away through the jungle we often see critters hanging on the side of the road for sale.  We have seen monkeys, and other animals.  We finally got the courage to stop and ask if we could take a picture.  The one on the right is a porcupine and the one on the left I’m not sure what it is .  There was a turtle hanging with them.  It is below and was alive at the time we took the picture.  These two were not alive.


People still carry a lot of things on their heads.  When they unload trucks they haul it in on their heads.  We have seen many times men with two 100 pound sacks of cement on their heads.  This guy has a huge bag with scrap plastic and metal parts that he will recycle I assume.

Zone excursion to Kribi

For P-day we took our missionaries to a resort town 21/2 hours away called Kribi.  It is on the Atlantic Ocean.  We are at the bus station at 7:00 a.m. to leave and finally left at 8:30 after stopping to get gas and to get a new spare tire for the one that was flat.

At Kribi we saw these beautiful water falls that empty into the ocean.  We rode in taxis for about 20 minutes from where the bus dropped us off in the center of town.  This was by far the most beautiful place we have seen in Cameroon.  It was a refreshing change of scenery.

Elder and Sister Gailey sitting on the trail that lead to the falls in an old boat made from hollowing out a log.

The missionaries changed into their p-day clothes after we arrived.  They always wear their name tags.  It drove them crazy not to be able to get in the ocean and go swimming.  When the frisbee went into the ocean the native below would go out and get it for them.  He played soccer with the missionaries and he was a lot of fun.

This young man played soccer and frisbee with the Elders.  He found this little sand crab walking along the beach and put it on his head where it would show up better.  We were having so much fun just getting away that we didn’t even take a picture of the ocean.  On the way home we were crammed into a 18 passenger small bus that had small fold down seats added in the isle that expanded the capacity to 34 people.  We were 11/2 hours late getting back to the bus because our taxis didn’t come on time.  We had 24 people sitting on the hot bus that were not very happy to see 10 white people show up and squeeze in between them.  We handed out pretzels and that seemed to help.  The ride back took 31/2 hours because the traffic was so bad.  My back was sore for a week.