This is an old story but one worth telling nonetheless. Before arrival in Australia, the base leaders had a small, white standard car ready for us. There was one small problem with that, neither Timothy or I know how to drive a standard and there are a lot of steep hills here. A friend in the states took us for a quick lesson so we thought we were good. However, Timothy started to get nervous as it wasn’t as easy as we thought to learn, especially because the house we were staying at is on anhuge, steep hill. Since we were jet-lagged, we were waking up at 230 in the morning the first week and Timothy would use that to our advantage by trying to drive the car when there weren’t any cars on the road. After about the 3rd day, we made a decision that it wasn’t safe to learn here having two kids and adjusting to driving to the other side of the road. We needed a solution and one fast.
We told our friend John who lives here the situation and the first automatic car he found online was a 2003 Red Toyota Camry. The car was pretty beat up, but we don’t care too much since its a temporary car. Also, the inward is more important than the outward, right? A guy from Nepal happened to be selling it. He was asking $3000 for it and that was a lot higher than we would have felt comfortable with since we will only be here for a few months. Timothy took a class on Negotiation and it definitely worked in our favor, along with God of course. He offered the guy $1800, in the next few hours after talking with his wife, he came back with $1900 and we had a deal. That is equivalent to about $1400 USD! We were amazed not only by the price of the car, but that it happens to be the exact same car I had in the states, only 3 years older, red too! It would have been a lot more to rent a car as well as we looked into that option too!
The plot thickens..
This Nepalese man was so nice. When Timothy had to sign some papers, he was invited up to his apartment for coffee and tea. We knew that God had him in our lives for a reason. Timothy asked this man if he needed prayer for anything and he did. Not only did his pain level go down, but he finished by saying that Jesus is awesome (he is Hindu)! We plan on inviting him and his wife over for dinner at some point! Enjoy the video!