Today's activities

Tina baked some awesome bread today! It was very good and tasty! We ate spaghetti for dinner and it was good as well. She is really getting her stuff down now.

I spent most of the day in the mechanics garage. I had to find a way to fix an end link on a swaybar to a Nissan Pathfinder. The fix I came up with worked well – they had attempted to fix it prior, but the fix broke. I took two Haitian guys with me down the road a couple miles and it felt much better according to the driver (even though I was driving). There were a number of rattles (I found one reason – a missing bushing – no doubt worn out from these horrible roads – we hardly ever get into third gear). The rattles could be solved and it felt really squishy, but the driver said that I fixed it and it was better.

They had two new vehicles that needed to be prepped. They are both Toyota Landcruisers, but not the kind you see in the US. These are utility vehicles with bare-bones, get-r-done equipment like chains to hold the tailgate up, fire extinguisher, AM-only radio, and a full-size (and very heavy) spare tire. They have rubber flooring just like our good old Suburban. I had to put together a rear bumper that was in parts and I had a Haitian guy named Jeff (who drove us around to find Lou) help me. It didn’t come with installation instructions and it was a little challenging – we only had to take it off once and put it back on.

Lou is grunting a lot today – not sure if that is stomach troubles or if it is something else (he is sitting on my lap now and is urping a lot – it stinks!). He is laughing and interacting a lot more every day. It is fun to have him around! We just have to figure out the tummy stuff.

We found out more about the camp that we are leaving to on the 18th or 19th for two weeks. It sounds like it will be really roughing it (I thought we were already roughing it… actually, it is very nice here in spite of the limited electricity, water, and food, expensive food, hard to get parts for broken things, and misc. things.