January 29, 2009, will not go down in history as one of my greatest days.

I woke up that morning with high hopes. I was almost finished with my work in the lowlands and was looking forward to an early departure so I could get home in time for my daughter Jilin’s fifteenth birthday party. But, when I went out to the truck, I got my first indication that things weren’t going to go according to schedule that day. A front tire was flat. Well, that wasn’t too surprising. Flat tires are about as common as mosquitoes here.

The tire was practically new, but upon removing it I found wire belting sticking out of it on all sides. The national highway had managed to destroy yet another $150 tire.

Sweat ran into my eyes and dripped off my nose as I dislodged the spare tire from the truck’s mud-encrusted underbody. Alas, it too was flat. I pulled out the trusty hand pump—mandatory equipment here. No need for multimillion-dollar fitness centers. Pumping up a flat spare is great exercise, and the sauna treatment is thrown in for free.

I soon realized the air was exiting the spare about as fast as I pumped it in. The tire shop employee had not tightened down the valve stem. I went back into the house to rummage around for the correct tool. When I came back with it, I found the valve stem so encrusted with mud that the tool wouldn’t fit. So I lugged the tire over to the well to wash out the mud. There was no hose or faucet, just a creaky hand pump. Where was the can of water to prime the pump? Finally, I found some water to splash into the top of the pump and began to crank the handle. By splashing water onto the tire and clawing at the mud with my fingers, I was able to remove most of the skin from my knuckles and a lot of the mud from the tire.

“Let’s get this baby over to the truck and hit the road,” I thought to myself. I was in efficiency mode as I hoisted the tire to my shoulders and began running toward the truck. Oops—bad move. I had forgotten that the moist cement around the well hosts a luxuriant garden of algae slime—amazing stuff with an even lower coefficient of friction than Teflon. You can imagine what happened next. In a flash, I was sprawled on the green cement with a 75-pound tire and wheel on top of me. Leaving behind a fresh donation of skin from my ankles, I crawled out of the slime garden, pushing the tire ahead of me, and hobbled to the truck; bleeding, but close to victory.

After working the pump a little more, I discovered the tire was still leaking, this time from the valve itself. I rummaged around and found a valve cap, but it wouldn’t thread all the way onto the stem because the threads were damaged. Painstakingly, I worked it forward and back, each time making a little headway as it coaxed the threads back where they belonged. Twist on, twist off. Twist on, twist off. Twist on, twist off. Fifteen minutes later, the spare tire was finally fixed.

With those hurdles past, I thought I was on the home stretch. I jockeyed the wheel into place on the hub. Two hands to lift the tire a quarter inch off the ground while my third hand fit a lug bolt into place and my forth hand reached for the wrench. Piece of cake.

I happily cranked away on the lug bolts, but something seemed to be wrong. From past experience, I seemed to remember the lug bolts tightening after 15 or 16 turns. But these felt snug after just a couple turns. I wanted to dismiss the little red flag and get on my way, but a small voice in my head whispered, “Remember that time you were driving down the national highway and you saw your front wheel rolling away from you into the ditch?” Yup, I remembered well. With a sigh, I twisted the lug bolts back off. Maybe the threads were messed up. On, off, on, off, on, off, on, off. No, the threads seemed okay. Maybe the hole in the aluminum rim was messed up. I inserted a lug bolt. It fit just fine. Maybe it was just my imagination.

I put the wheel back on and started tightening the lug bolts. “Wow—they’re going all the way in now. I am so smart.” Four lug bolts on loosely, and two more to go. “Whoops. What do we have here?” Number five didn’t want to go into its hole. “I can just skip that one,” I thought as I reached for number six. But it didn’t want to go in either. About an hour of head scratching and experimentation followed. Eventually, I discovered that, although the lug bolts all looked exactly the same, the outside diameters of some bolts and their corresponding holes were a couple thousandths of an inch bigger than the others.

By the time I got the truck fixed, the sun was high in the sky and beating down on me mercilessly. It was already well past time to go to the hospital and talk to the doctor about our in-patients, but I needed to wash up first. I didn’t want to have the whole ward go running away holding their noses and yelling, “Here comes another stinky Americano!”

By the time I was ready to leave, it was 11 a.m. The doctors had long ago made their rounds, so I would have to go in search of them at their various hospitals. (Most doctors here run their own hospitals as well as seeing patients at the general hospital.)

When I arrived at the general hospital, things went pretty much as they had been that morning. “I need to pick up the x-ray,” I said.

“Whose x-ray?”

“Lebin’s x-ray.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Muntu.”

“That’s not the name we have.”

“That’s because their last names do not work the same way as last names in the lowlands. Women’s last names don’t necessarily change when they marry.”

“What is their problem? Why don’t they do things the right way?”

“It’s their culture.”

“No, it’s the wrong way.”

“Anyway, even though you have a different name, may I please have the x-ray?”

“She had no x-ray.”

“But I’m sure she had one taken.”

“No, she didn’t.”

“But it says right here that an x-ray was requested.”

“We do not have an x-ray.”

“Why did the billing department charge me for an x-ray?”

“That’s the billing department’s problem.”

“But she had a shoulder problem and needed an x-ray.”

“No, we were treating her for a UTI.”

“But she had shoulder problems . . . Okay. What about the other patient? I need the results of the ultrasound.”

“I am sorry, but we have no results for the ultrasound.”

“But she had an ultrasound taken.”

“Yup.”

“So, where are the results?”

“We have no results. We take ultrasounds, but there is nobody here to read them.”

“Well, may I have the picture?”

“Sure, it’s right there.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t see anything but black.”

“Well, I guess you can’t read ultrasounds either.”

“But there is no image. The whole thing is just black.”

“You will have to ask the doctor. Sit there. The doctor will be here in an hour or two.”

“Well, thanks for your help.”

[An hour and a half later.] “Well, Doc, thanks for the ultrasound. By the way, could you tell me what this prescription says that you wrote?”

“Why do you need me to tell you? It’s written right there.”

“Well you see, nobody in the mountains was able to read it either.”

“So, what is their problem?”

“I don’t know. They just could not read it.”

“Okay, I will write it again.”

“Thanks Doc.”

Fortunately, I was able to find the person who ran the pharmacy. After studying it, she wrote it out for me in a legible manner. At that point, I really felt I had accomplished something. It was now after 1 p.m., and I was in possession of a black piece of paper and a legible prescription.
By four that afternoon, I was back at the hospital trying to explain to a Palawano mother that her baby, who had weighed three pounds and was on the brink of death five days before, was not ready for discharge. In fact, leaving the hospital now would mean almost certain death. The mother, a weathered old mountain woman who had been as sick as her baby just a couple days before, loudly proclaimed that she would not stay in the hospital another day as her husband tried to calm her down. Their married daughter was nursing her little brother because her mother couldn’t. Everyone was jabbering at once.
As the whole situation was about to boil over, I ran to the doctor and asked if the mother could be released. The doctor grudgingly agreed. I obtained the release and went back to offer the family a deal: The mother could go to the nearby village of Kabanga`an, and the father and older daughter would stay with the baby until it weighed a whopping four pounds. As I finished my pitch, everyone went bananas. The mother and daughter dissolved into tears. I was at the end of my rope. “God, I’m giving this problem to you,” I prayed. “I sure don’t have any solutions.”

Finally, the daughter went back to the pediatric ward to be with her tiny baby brother. The father seemed rational, and I brokered a truce with him. He agreed to my plan, and I left to get ready to take his wife to the village and then head for the mountains and home.

That little bubble of momentum burst quite quickly. At my locked truck, I reached into my pocket for the key. It wasn’t there. I peered through the window. There it was, dangling from the ignition switch. No big deal—I had a hidden key on the truck. Eyeing the freshly installed tire as I bent over, I felt for the key. It was gone. I crawled under the truck. I chipped away at the dried mud, hoping it was just covered over, but the key was gone for good, and so were my hopes of getting into the truck.

By this time, there was no reason to rush. Darkness would close in soon. So much for Jilin’s birthday celebration. I had been home for a total of four days that whole month, and I couldn’t even get home for my daughter’s birthday. I know the Bible says we should give thanks in all things. Well, at that moment, I can honestly say I wasn’t feeling very thankful. Still, I determined to be thankful by faith. It was a decision. Feelings had nothing to do with it.
The day had become like running a marathon. At the beginning of the race, you think about your target finishing time, but by the end, all you can think about is finishing. I had no idea when I would get into the mountains, but every fiber of my being was focused on getting there, whenever that actually happened.

Suddenly, a glimmer of hope flared up. Didn’t I have an extra set of keys at the house? I walked home, and there they were.

Back at the hospital, I helped the lady into the truck, but I had to slam the door to keep her husband from squeezing in after her. I had to remind him that his place was at the hospital with his infant. As I turned onto the road, the lady began wailing loudly.

Darkness had fallen when we arrived at Kabanga`an. I shifted the truck into four-wheel drive, and we slithered and bumped up a steep trail. At the house, a large crowd of curious people greeted us. I sat down on the front step of the house with a flashlight clenched between my teeth and wrote out symbol directions for the lady’s medications. It was a laborious process. A picture of a rising sun for the morning dose, a full sun for medicines to be taken at noon, a setting sun for evening medicine and a moon for a medicine to be taken at night. Every package had to be marked. By the time I was finished, everyone in the village could repeat exactly what pill should be taken when—everyone, that is, but the patient. She giggled and looked away and refused to learn what she was supposed to do. Finally, I put one of the bystanders in charge of making sure she took her medication.

At 8:30 p.m., I pulled into the sleepy little village of Bingbilang where I usually leave the truck for my hike home to Kamantian. Most of the villagers were bedded down, and nobody came out to see what crazy thing I was up to now. I gathered my belongings into my backpack, threw the extra stuff that didn’t fit into a gunny sack I slung over my shoulder and headed up the trail.
It was a long hike. At night, it always takes longer, and there are more animals on the trail—frogs, poisonous centipedes and snakes. In my flashlight’s feeble beam, it was hard to judge the angle of the rocks I stepped onto. At one point, I lost my balance and began falling the wrong direction—the one where it’s a long way down before I would hit anything. I am not sure what halted my fall. I thought I was a goner, but something pushed me in another direction, and I did not fall. Perhaps it was the hand of my angel.

The hike into Kamantian provides a lot of time to think and pray. For a long while, I hiked with only the sounds of the insects, toads and frogs accompanying me—alone with my thoughts and with my God. As I hiked through various villages along the way, all was quiet except for the occasional bark of a dog.

It was nearly midnight when I finally descended the slippery path to our house. I cannot express my feeling of delight when the house came into view in the moonlight. There on the grass in front of our house, Jilin and her friends were still celebrating. The party was winding down, but I had not missed it entirely. It was so good to be home. So good to be with Leonda again. So good to have a place called home. So good to have so many blessings, and so good to know that, in spite of the trials and tribulations, the most wonderful place to be on earth is where God wants you to be.

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