A cultural experience… Yesterday, we were to travel back to Dakar with a missionary friend, but before we left we realized we had a flat tire. No problem. We put on the spare tire. ( There is not much humidity or salt on the roads here so there was no “Wisconsin factor” of rust to deal with to get the tire off.) Then we headed to one of the many tire shops near by. We pulled off the road next to a horse cart getting it’s wheel fixed while the horse was taking a lunch break. The tire shop was a shack with many tires outside. Young men or teenagers ran the shop and took our bad wheel off it’s rim using a metal hammer and flat bar. Then they took a flat rock and smoothed the place where the hole was and put some chemical on it and did the same on another piece of rubber and let those dry on the roof of the shack. Then they took the spare tire( which was also a bit flat) and made sure there were no leaks. The way they did this was over fill the tire with air. Then they took an old bottle and poured some water all over it to see if they could see bubbles coming out. No leaks! Then they took the broken tire from the room and put the patch on, hammered it back on the rim and blew the tire up to full capacity. Well, their gauge of that was to pound on it to see how full they thought it was. Then they put them back on for us. All that cost was $2. Unfortunately, the tire was not able to be fixed because after driving on it, it flattened again. So we stopped again and put the spare back on. Then we stopped at another tire shop and got the spare filled to the right level using a tire gauge that this tire shop did have. That only cost 50 cents. So a trip that should have taken 1 ½ hours took 2 ½ hours. This trip showed me the benefits of having a good attitude and to be patient with the events of life. It also showed me that you need to be prepared with spare tires, how useful it is to have so many tire shops and to know French to communicate with them.
David Abbott says
The lower photo could serve as checkered shirt version of “Where is Waldo?” You would have a very similar tire repair experience in Asia or Latin America. The only difference would be the language.