Kiki Goes Home: PART 3

Family and Friends,

Please enjoy the conclusion of this three part series.  May God bless your adventure today, even if you find yourself trying to figure out life (your adventure) without someone you love.  -The Grimms

PART THREE: Going forward without Kiki...

We left Kiki's funeral and the car was dead. Nice. It was also roughly the temperature of the sun inside the car. After overcoming a few seconds of denial (remember the episode of dropping Lynn's toilet bowl into the outhouse?) we began to address the problem. A Pastor from the church recruited someone with jumper cables to try to help us. That didn't work. Ronal (Mission Haiti driver) was still there, and he is a mechanic, so he took a look for us. His diagnosis was a bad starter, but he also had to leave for Port and couldn't do anything else to help us. The Pastor phoned a local mechanic and asked him to come out and take a look.

We knew life without Kiki would be an adventure, but did if have to start immediately?

The group now consisted of Sue, Mdm. Dominique (MH cook), myself (Cory), Gertrude (MH orphanage director), Patchouko (MH staff), and about five members of the youth group. We found a shady place and started joking around, the standard way to deal with problems in Haiti. We didn't think to pray about the situation just yet. That would come later.

The mechanic arrived on a motorcycle and asked me to pay the driver who gave him a ride. Standard stuff. After a lot of tinkering around, he declared that he needed some other tools. We waited for his assistant to come. Actually, two assistants came, and for the next couple of hours they tried to extract the starter from the car with no success. Mike, on his way to the airport in Port-au-Prince, had assured me on the phone that it was an easy fix. Not in Haiti, I guess. They finally gave up, demanded money for their time, and left.

Next we contacted the only person we could think of in Ti-Rivier with a car who was in the area at the time (Adrien was across the country somewhere), Boss Edens, the contractor who does most of our building projects. The nice thing is that he has been in the doghouse with Pam recently and so we had a little bit of leverage. Fortunately, he was in Les Cayes at the moment and agreed to come. By this time it was mid-afternoon and we were all getting quite thirsty.

Boss Edens showed up and we attached the cars with a 10-12 foot nylon rope. Everyone else besides me piled into his car, and we started the incredibly nerve-wracking process of towing the car back through the traffic-saturated city, out into the country-side, and up the rocky hills to Ti-Rivier. The whole process took about an hour, but it seemed like a day. It might have been my least favorite hour of my life. This is where I made up for the missed prayers earlier.

With the battery not working properly I had no power-steering or power to the brakes, so both of them were continually asking me to provide the power for them. I think there were a few moments when Boss Edens forgot he was towing someone, because we were passing trucks, cars, and other motorcycles just like it was a normal drive home from Cayes. There were actually two times when a motorcycle driver passed me, paused between the bumpers of the two cars (with only 10 feet between), and then passed Boss Edens. Scary stuff. Going over the 15 or so speed bumps was no picnic, and we even snapped the rope once doing that.

In the end we made it home safely, though getting up the driveway took a couple of tries, and we could smell that his transmission wasn't too happy about the whole thing. Over the next week we installed a new battery and that didn't help, so the car is still sitting there out of commission. However, Adrien is back in town, so if we have an emergency with his help (and car) it will be easier to deal with.

So Kiki is gone now, and the adventure continues, but now it feels a little bit like we are acrobats without a safety net. Having Kiki there was a kind of mental safeguard when thinking about all the things that could happen down here at any given moment. I've always pictured that if we had a medical emergency in our family, for instance, we could hop in the car, begin driving to Port, and meet Kiki somewhere to guide us through the emergency, getting us into hospitals or whatever needed to be done. Now who would we call? Mike and Pam do have other missionary contacts around the country, so that would probably be the next best thing, and there is always the US embassy, but Kiki was our personal helper and always available in times of need.

If you want to go back and read an example of what I am talking about, and adventure where Kiki was instrumental in causing a positive outcome, check out the following post on our blog:

"An Adventurous Adventure" from October, 2010

In the end this whole story, this whole adventure is not about us, the Grimm Family. It isn't even about Mission Haiti. In fact, it isn't even about Kiki. It is about our Almighty God, who has a plan, who has a purpose for every one of us, and who will call each of home (who trust in Christ for salvation) at just the right time, and His grace will guide those of us who are left to continue. That is what this story is all about. Kiki would have agreed with that statement when he was here...how much more would he agree with it now from the perspective he is currently enjoying?