Gringos on Parade! A flat tire in Honduras.

Team Blue and Team Red working the pit: 36:08
from tire blow to roll, not exactly NASCAR.

Honduras had been an amazing experience. Our border crossing was smooth (even though we'd first driven 10 clicks past the checkpoint and had to return) and we'd had two amazing days of painting a school and a medical clinic.

Public School supported by the
ministry of Pastor Miguel Pinell.

Yojoa Medical Center, Dr. Milton Mendoza
Serving a population center of over 1 million people.

The late afternoon had ended with a refreshing stop along the side of the road where our crew relaxed in the cool mountain waters and swam with some locals.

Ulua River, future site of a hydro-electric plant
that will fund a hospital and provide power and
telecommunications to all of Honduras.

Hilarity ensured on the drive to the local gas station where we would change clothes for dinner, hosted by the pastor and his wife of the church where Emmaus Crew Member Jacob Farler would be preaching to the indigenous congregation. 

Some of the guys, Jacob, Logan, and Adam had made the socially distracting decision of keeping their shirts off while they rode through the center of town, attracting the laughter of locals that perceived The Great White Gringo Parade.

That was the moment that the day took a detour. I was shooting video at the moment of impact, hoping to capture on film the local school kids laughing at our group... what I captured was something much better (or worse).

Like a bad dream... the truck we were following, with all of our local contacts inside, kept going, leaving us disabled at the side of the road in an unknown town. Could you hear Antony laughing in the video? I was not amused!

Our driver, doing his best to offer cranky me a valid solution said, "Let me call for some help." My terse reply was, "It's just a flat tire. If I called help to change my tire, I couldn't consider myself a man." The group was awkwardly quiet as Otto's reply was, "I guess that is just a cultural difference." 

I had to laugh (and later apologize), and we pulled out the manual to begin the Quest of Releasing the Spare. Like a scene from an adventure movie, we discovered the multi-step method of releasing the tire, lowering it to the group, and unlocking it from its steel mechanism. 

The tire iron had to be inserted into a tube underneath the bumper and turned clock-wise while Antony laid on his back and painfully disengaged the tire before it fell to the ground. We soon discovered that we had every tool needed... except one. We had no way to remove the bolts that held the wheel to the car.

Thankfully, our contact, Pastor Miguel returned. He'd dropped our shirtless guys and their sidekicks at the gas station. To my immense relief, he had a tire tool that fit our massive lug nuts. 

Using all of my body strength and also leveraging my weight on the bar, I successfully cracked the King-Kong tight seal on each nut, and then began to work on the jack while Cameron began to back the lugs off the tire.

At the time, I'd forgotten my unfortunate wardrobe choice. Earlier in the day I'd worn a red shirt. Later I swam in red shorts. In a rush to get to the gas station to change clothes for the evening events, I'd just grabbed my shirt at thrown it on. And so here I was, changing a tire on the side of the road in Central America, looking like Richard Simmons, or possible the Red Ranger from Power Rangers.

I kept cranking and cranking that jack... I'd substituted the missing crank handle for a new adjustable wrench that I bought on a whim before leaving Guatemala. The more I cranked, the more convinced I was that it wasn't working. It raised so slowly, I never once could detect it rising. 

With our crew standing by for moral support, and with Vince shooting video to preserve the event for the ages, the van slowly rose, the busted tire was removed, and the new tire was securely installed. Team Emmaus had crossed a new threshold... we were now Tire Change Certified.

With the spare installed, we made our way to rejoin the others at the gas station and successfully travelled through the mountains to dinner and the service where Jacob preached and the Spirit moved powerfully. Surely, God was with us through the entire day. 

We gave thanks that night. We were thankful for the paint and relationships, we were thankful for the cooling river, we were thankful for a delicious chicken and rice dinner in a small house alongside the rock and dirt mountain pass, we were thankful for the time of worship and commitment at church, and we were thankful for our time along the road as we encountered a challenge and worked together to fix it.

The next day Pastor Miguel helped us to purchase a used tire that would be our new spare, and our crew continued down the road, continuing to encounter the Christ in others and even in ourselves along the way.