Broken Brakes

Hello All,
Currently we are doing great here in Tsumeb. The rain continues making this an unusually long rainy season for this region, or so I'm told. This last week Rachel and I have been doing many things around the compound not least of which is grant writing for By Provision. Rachel will be doing this fulltime next week when I'm going drilling in Rundu. We had some Peace Corps friends over yesterday and played a round of Pandemic which was a lot of fun.

Life around here consists of drilling, putting pumps in after drilling, repairing wells, preparing for drill trips, grant writing, administrative work for BP, doing hygeine and sanitation trainings with people in villages, going on walks, reading, watching movies/tv from our computer and playing with the dogs. Honestly most days we aren't drilling we don't get off the compound for much else than shopping and exercise because of all the other work we have to do. I have also been asked to preach at our church every other week until May so that has been a fun adventure. I have never really preached consistently like this so it has been a good experience.

Last weekend was Independence Holiday for Namibia and we had the only other married couple in PC Namibia over for the weekend. We took them to Etosha and had a great time with them. Funny thing we found out on Friday of that weekend is that we have the same anniversary to the year August 4, 2007. How crazy is that? But this story is about what happened while at Etosha National Park for animal viewing. I (caleb) drove most of the day but then was tired and let Rachel take over early afternoon. About an hour after she starts driving we begin hearing a faint whining coming from the undercarriage. Thinking its just a stick or something we stop and look but its nothing so we just ignore it for the time being. Then it turns into a clunking, grinding sound coming from the back rear tire. This is disconcerting, especially since we are in the middle of Etosha with very few tools to fix anything (not that any of us could actually fix something on a car) Needless to say this sound said pull over and check me out because I am destroying something internally.

So we pulled over at the only rest stop near us which constitutes a 5 ft fence, not very reassuring when their are lions, cheetahs, leopards and elephants all of which that little fence means nothing. With our 5ft peace of mind ,and that's all it was, we pull the truck in and jack it up to take the tire off and see what we can see. After taking the tire off we can't see anything so we go further and take off the brake cover, and as we do this two little pieces of metal fall out of the brakes. Yeah! I'm sure those weren't important. As we look further we find that another large piece had broken off and wedged itself in the brake assembly, grinding on the wheel hub. After a little work we were able to get this piece out but then thought, what do these pieces go to? It seemed like the brakes but we don't know anything about brakes so to be sure we needed to take off the other side to make sure. So we put the right rear tire back on and proceed to take off the left rear tire and brake cover. Here is a picture of the left rear assembly.
As you can see there is a cog looking thing in the middle and a s-shaped flat metal piece next to it. These things had fallen off and the cog thing was grinding on the wheel hub. So now we have decided that everything is "ok" because these parts obviously had something to do with the brakes and only having one wheel out isn't so bad. So as we try to put the brake cover back on we find out next problem, getting the brake cover back on. We pushed and pulled and prodded and forced and jerked and still after about a hour of this the cover was still not on. Well the sun is getting low in the sky and its about 6:15pm at this time so our options are sleep in the aegis of a worthless 5ft fence or do something drastic to get this dang thing back on. So we decide to disassemble the left rear brakes as well until we can get the cover on. We started by taking out all the parts in the above picture and then started pushing and prodding again and presto magico the cover went back on. Don't know how or why that worked but I'm just glad that it did because if had taken any longer we wouldn't have made it out of the park. So then we rushed out of the park, probably a 40 minute drive from where we were, and just made it at 7:25pm which is the exact time the park closed. Now all we had to do was drive home with front brakes only at night with headlights that didn't work very well...piece of cake:)