Medicine Man

Kibidula is a big place. It is situated on around eight square miles of land and I happen to live in the farthest corner. In light of this fact I wisely chose to get a bicycle. All was going well until the other day I took it out of my room to ride somewhere, when, lo and behold, I saw that my tire was completely flat. There was a boy from my unit standing there while I was despondently inspecting the tire. He looked at my tire and assured me in his broken English that he could fix the bike because he had “some medicine in his room for bicycles”. “This will be good,” I thought, “give the bike some Ibuprofen and all will be better, I should have thought of that myself”. While I was musing to myself, he trotted off to his room and returned with a pair of pliers, a bicycle pump, a knife, and a small piece of rubber from some other unlucky tire tube. He then proceeded to take out the tube and look for the hole. Once he found it he took the knife and rubbed it back and forth across the tire to buff it so the glue would stick. I had never before seen a kitchen knife being used to fix a tire and I sat transfixed. I tried to explain to him that we use a buffing liquid in America instead of a knife. “Oh, he said, “maybe your medicine in America is better”. I assured him that his medicine looked just fine, and so far my tire has held air good.