11. Shipment from Home: East Africa a New Life Adventure

 Within the first few months I ask my brother in Idaho to send a few things by sea freight.The list included an electric clothes washing machine with an old fashioned wringer, like our families used in the1930’s; a one gallon hand-crank ice cream making machine, like the White Mountain we had at home; a three ton hydraulic jack; two camping tents; fishing gear; two bicycles for our children; a selection of books such as the Hobbit; and a selection of wrenches including a socket set.  It was very important that the shipment be contained in a sturdy plywood box, as I had plans to use the plywood to build a camper in the Commer Van we had bought. It took 4 months for the shipment to arrive. The washing machine made our House Boy (Elias) the hit of the Campus. 

 

With the tools that had arrived I had an opportunity to investigate a small crawler tractor that had been buried in the weeds since before we arrived at Kigari.  When I expressed an interest the HeadMaster had the workman clear the weeds from around the machine. With the help of the school Land Rover the crawler was put under the carport attached to the house where we were living at the time.  The Carport roof was a “must”,  because Gathono (Rainy Season) was approaching, and we had to have some place half dry to work on the Crawler. Gathono was a good work time because once you left the tarmac the roads became so muddy that they were nearly impassable.  Most dirt roads in the highlands of Kenya are coated with a product known as Murum (clay) that made a good road when dry but when wet it became a sticky mess.  It was so sticky that it would fill the fenders on bicycles to the point that the wheels would not turn.  There was a three mile dirt road between the tarmac and the college, and that meant that we did very little traveling during Gathono. 

 The tractor was an interesting piece of machinery made in Germany and evidently donated to the college by a philanthropic organization. While being an ideal small machine for shombas (small farms) which were typical for the region, the operators had not been mechanically savvy enough to know how to keep bolts tight. The Crawler was powered with a 14 Horsepower engine that was bolted to the differential housing. With the bolts loose there was enough flexibility to break the drive line.  After all the time the machine sat in the weeds, the engine was still in working order so the job was to separate the engine from the differential to get access to the drive line which had to be welded. Milton, my son, who was seven years old at the time, helped me remove the  tracks to make it easier to remove the engine.  When that was done and the drive line disconnected, I gave it to the school driver with specific instructions on how to get welding repair done. I sent him to Nairobi where he could find a machine shop that could do the job right. When the driver returned with the part, it had not been done right and was not usable. I got permission to use an arc welder from a local secondary school and by cutting the driveline, I managed to weld it back together close enough to right angles to make it work. Without more details the Crawler was operational once again.  In 1967 the mechanical knowledge of the local people was almost non-existent.