Welcome to our series You're Not Alone, in which Allen Sonter, for many years a missionary educator in the islands of the South Pacific, tell stories that help us to know that God is always watching over us wherever we are.
This episode is entitled God Can Help You Fix Anything. At the beginning of 1957, I was asked to head up the 7th day Adventist School on the island of Abimama in the Gilbert Islands, which are now called Kittypus, and my wife and I arrived at the island on a small interisland trading boat.
We were met by a big, muscular Tongan with a broad smile who introduced himself as Henry Moala, second in charge at the school. After we collected a few suitcases and hand luggage, henry led the way to a beat up old Morris truck. We threw our bags on the back and Henry hoisted himself into the driver's seat while my wife and I squeezed in on the passenger side.
We were then off to the school, about three kilometres away. We would return to the ship later for the heavy boxes and crates. We hadn't gone far when Henry said, this truck has no brakes.
I try not to use it any more than I have to, but I'm very nervous driving it. We'd almost reached a school when there was a sound like a gunshot. The old truck lurched to an unsteady stop.
We all piled out to find that the driver's side front tire had blown out, making a long tear in the side wall. The tires were old and perished from the tropical heat and we had no spare on board. We walked the short distance of the school and took a jack back to the truck.
After removing the wheel, we rolled it back to the school workshop, such as it was, an open thatch roof structure, and I carefully extracted the tube. A 15 centimeter gash along the side made me think that tube had ended its useful life. But we don't have another inner tube, Henry groaned.
How are we going to get your things from the wharf? At this point it looked as though God would need to intervene in some unusual way if we were to complete the transfer of our boxes from the wharf to the school. So I prayed, Lord, you know this problem and would you please show us what to do now? Immediately my mind went back to a time in the late 1930s when, as a small boy, I'd been taken by my parents from Nelson to Dunedin in South New Zealand in an old Model T Ford Motor caravan. We had so many blowouts that eventually my father had no spare tube and we were stranded miles from any garage with no way to get help.
My father then collected dried grass from beside the road and stuffed the tire as full as he could get it back on the wheel. That stuffed tire took us quite some distance until we came to a garage. The only problem I recall about the incident was that the grass tended to move about in the tyre, so we had a quite bumpy ride.
Now, the Lord brought this experience back to my memory and also pointed out that there were plenty of coconut husks all around us, left over from the copper making activities that go on all the time in abamama. Coconut husks are the raw material that koia is made from and are tough and fibrous. Let's collect some coconut husks, I suggested to Henry.
We can stuff them into one of these old tyres and that should get us at least a load or two from the wharf. Henry was a bit uncertain about this new kind of inner tube, but he and some of the schoolboys soon had a pile of husks waiting for their new role as inner tube for the truck. I stuffed the husks in as tightly as I could and then fitted the tire back on the rim.
We took the repaired wheel back to the truck, fitted it and let the jack down. There were whoops of delight all around. When the tyre looked just as good as the others, I thanked God for the idea and we were ready to go again.
Henry confided that he wasn't too comfortable about driving the truck, especially without brakes, so he insisted that I take over the task. Fortunately, Abermama is a coral atoll and the road is perfectly flat. Fortunately, also, the handbrake did work reasonably well, so I cautiously started out on my first drive in the old truck.
During the afternoon, we managed to bring the remainder of the cargo from the ship, but by the time we brought the last load, the coconut husks had moved around in the tire, making the ride very bumpy indeed. It was obvious that husks were not a permanent solution to our problem, so there were two problems to fix the brakes and the inner tube. I asked God for help and began looking around for some way of fixing the tube.
There was an old torn inner tube in the shed and a partly used tube of bostic contact glue. But could a 15 centimeter gash be repaired with bostic? I cut a large patch from the old tube and glued it over the gash. In the damaged one, it seemed to stick fairly well, so we found an old tire that seemed to be in better shape than the rest and fitted the repaired inner tube and tire onto the rim.
Cautiously, we pumped it up to see whether it would hold. It did and served without trouble until we were able to get a new tube. Then I turned my attention to the brakes.
I should say here that my previous experience at mechanical work consisted of nothing more than repairing my push bike and of replacing one rocker cover gasket in my Morris Miner in New Zealand over a year earlier. But after asking God to help, I tackled the brakes. When I dismantled the master cylinder, I found the trouble to be that the rubber washer was so worn that it allowed the fluid to leak past replacement parts would have to come by ship from Melbourne and that would take many weeks.
Looking carefully at the worn rubber part, I noticed that if its outer edges could be held firmly against the wall of the cylinder, the fluid might not be able to escape. So I found the lid of a tin can and cut it into a disc with fingers protruding all around the circumference. It was made big enough to fit inside the rubber washer, with the fingers pushing the outer edges of the washer against the cylinder wall.
This device was then inserted into the cylinder and the whole thing reassembled. And it worked. We had brakes again.
I'm sure that God gives us the ideas we need to fix things when we ask Him to. Sometime after the tube and brake incident, I decided that the school needed a lawn mower. The soil of the atolls is almost pure coral sand, but there is a little humus, and if it rains often enough, which happens periodically, a coarse grass does grow over the ground.
It looks rather untidy if not trimmed, and the islanders cut it with long machetes. But I thought the school students time could be better used in other ways if we had a lawnmower. So I took stock of our resources.
There were some pieces of angle iron and sheet metal lying around that could be made into a frame. In the workshop were a couple of old wartime Briggs and Stratton motors, about 5 guessed. The bearings in one were worn and useless, but I hoped the other could be made to run again.
There was an old circular saw spindle on the floor that could be pressed into service to mount a mower blade on, and a pair of old steel concrete mixer wheels, plus a pair of discarded baby pram wheels, which could make the contraption mobile. Finally, a leaf from a jeep spring drilled in the centre could be mounted on the source spindle as a blade. So to work I went and the result was, believe it or not, a lawn mower.
Not unlike one of those old hater mowers that cut many an acre of lawn around the Pacific islands in the days before Victor Honda and Rover got into the act. Well, the mower did a noble task for some time. But one day disaster struck.
I was busy in the workshop while a student was using the lawn mower some 50 meters or so away. Suddenly, from the direction of the mower came a sharp metallic screeching. I thought that the blade edited some concrete or a piece of metal and expected to hear the mower start up again.
But soon the student came into the workshop and said, the mower has run out of petrol and it won't start. I knew the mower couldn't be out of petrol, as it had been filled only a few minutes earlier. So I went to investigate.
I fitted the starting rope to the pulley and pulled firmly, expecting to feel the resistance of the compression. But the pulley turned freely. Something was seriously wrong.
The motor was soon in the workshop and when it was opened, it was indeed a sorry sight. The big end bearing had overheated let go. And the inertia of the spinning blade kept the crankshaft turning as the connecting rod and piston fell downwards.
The result was that the piston and rod had become a mass of small pieces of metal in the bottom of the engine. Inquiries revealed that the student had been holding the mower on angle by pushing down on the handles, and the oil had not reached the big end as it should. What to do now? Again, a prayer to the God who was always there brought the needed help.
After cleaning up the engine, I could see that the damage had been limited to the piston and connecting rod. But incredibly, the crank pin was not badly scored. An examination of the spare engine revealed that its piston and connecting rod were in good condition.
But there was no big end bearing shell in place. My colleague, the Pacific Islands veteran of many years'experience, Walter Ferris, looked at the bearing and said, I've got a jeep bearing shell that I think I can cut to fit that bearing. Let me see what I can do.
So it was that an hour or so later, walter Ferriss came in with two halves of a bearing shell that fitted pretty well around the crank of the Briggs motor. Jeep bearings were much bigger in diameter than Briggs big ends, and these cut down shells had been formed into the tighter curve by hammering them into the seats. What was needed now was some way of grinding the two halves of the shell into shape against the crank pin so that the correct clearance could be made.
Valve grinding paste would be no good because the particles were too big, creating too much clearance. But God was there again with the needed ideas. Why not toothpaste? The particles are fine enough, it would just take patience.
So I spread toothpaste on the faces of the shell, set it in place over the crank pin and gently tightened the bolts until I felt resistance. Then I worked the rod back and forth to grind in the shell. This process was repeated again and again until the bolts could be tightened right up without any binding of the shell on the pin.
And the motor gave many months of trouble free service. I was not alone out on that small atoll. And whoever or wherever you are right now, you're not alone either.
God is just a prayer away and he's waiting for you to realize your need of him and call to him for help.
You've been listening to our series You're Not Alone stories told by Allen Sonter that help us to know that God is always watching over us, wherever we are. If you have any comments or questions, send an email to
[email protected] or give us a call within Australia on zero two four nine seven, three three four five.
Six. May God bless you and remember you are not alone. You have been listening to a production of Three ABN Australia australia Radio.
