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.
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