Shopping for a Micro

After being kicked out of New Horizon, we had to decide how we would continue to work with the people there. We have some really good relationships and do not want to see the 2 years we already have invested go to waste. Our idea was to sell my wife's Blazer (it can't get fixed here anyway) and buy a micro-bus. That way we could pick up the people on the highway where the town council has no authority and bring them to our house for services.

Very quickly my home church gave us $7,500 and two days before we left KS an anonymous couple in the church dropped off the other half of the money needed. So we quickly started shopping.

One of our closest friends here is Luis. He owns a couple Micros and a couple larger 28 passenger buses that he rents to tourists in Petén and Belize. He also speaks English and has proven to be very dependable and trustworthy. We met him with our first group of teenagers that visited us in July, 2007 and use him exclusively for all of our missions teams.

He volunteered to help us shop around. We went saw several Micros to get an idea of what was available. However the nicest one was the one we were riding around in. The money converted to be around Q120,000, but he was asking Q140,000 for his, so we weren't really that interested. It was my dad who pitched to him that he take the Blazer and Q100,000. After a couple days he called and said that he liked that offer.

He knows all the problems we have had with the Blazer and are still having, but for some reason he still wanted it. At least I have a clean conscience that I didn't sell it to some unsuspecting Guatemalan just to unload my problems.

With the other Q20,000 we set to fixing the Micro. It is a "16 passenger" 2007 Toyota HiAce, manual transmission turbo-diesel with 195,000 km. Supposedly they will run 500,000 km without too much effort.

I had the stickers removed along with the very thick tinting on the front windows. The tinting was so think that you could barely see the mirrors during the day and they were invisible at night. We also had to fix the sliding door handle that wouldn't open from the inside, replace the turbo belt and replace the windshield. We had all the fluids changed and filled just to start from scratch on the service. I also bought and had installed a rear bumper guard, front grill guard, fog lights and had the luggage rack painted.

The downside is that I really miss my automatic transmission, but I won't have to ride in a tow truck to Guatemala City to get it fixed either. The best part is that we have a vehicle that the boys can ride in safely with their seat belts. On a recent trip back and forth to Guatemala City (7 hours each way) we spent Q550 ($70) in diesel. It costs us twice that in gas in my pickup. Here's some Micro pics: