You may wonder how it got "arrested", if you don't get our prayer letter. So I guess I will finally tell the tale, since everything is over, we hope. A few days before I came back to Ukraine (in February), Garry was driving home from one of his English followup classes. It had been raining that day, it was foggy, and dark of course, since it was around/after ten pm.
He was on our street in the village, between the two stores, when he swerved around a pothole and ran over a man lying on the road, drunk and passed out. Garry stopped to see what he had hit with the car. The man was alive, but Garry was sure he was going to die. He got Max and he phoned the emergency services while the man laid there in the road. They covered him with a blanket and waited at least two hours for the ambulance. Someone passing by thought he was her cousin, but it turned out it was a different young man, who'd had a fight with his girlfriend and gotten drunk. Two of the students walking home from milking that evening were harassed by two drunk guys, maybe an hour before Garry drove home, possibly he was one of them.
The police arrived maybe an hour after that and finally let the ambulance transfer the man to the hospital maybe a hour later. Miraculously the man did not die. He had a number of operations, and was in hospital for about a month. Garry paid for much of his care since his family did not have money for it. Health care is free here, but not medicine as they say. He is now living with his parents somewhere in Dnepropetroesk, continuing to recover at home and will have another small operation which is planned in June.
The police had Garry pay to tow his car to their facility and said they would check it for defects and it would take about a week. The car was not drive-able due to damage underneath to the radiator. However, for weeks they said they would be using it to re-stage the accident.
Garry hired a lawyer the next day, who hired an expert to re-stage the accident in case the police wanted to charge Garry for the accident. Months later, the police never got around to their staging, and we began to think we'd never get the car back.
We were told the car had been arrested by the court. The lawyer tried several ways to get it returned, and finally went to court twice and just before we went to Kiev with Garry's family for their flight home, the lawyer called and said we could get it on Tuesday, but we were gone that day, so Wednesday morning... but we were later getting back, so Wednesday afternoon, we got the car!
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| This when we cheered, it was out! |
As you can see in the photo, this got exciting when we were going around a traffic circle and the bumper nearly came off!
We had to wait a week for everything to get fixed, since all three radiators had to be replaced and the bumper after it got more broken pulling it. We even got the air conditioning fixed while it was there, it never worked all last summer. Forgot that the front passenger seatbelt was stuck again, we hadn't used it since November since no one puts it on but me...
Took a little longer to fix because the key wouldn't work and had to get reprogrammed because the battery had been so dead, Garry thinks the GPS was plugged in or interior lights were still on when it was towed.
Thanks to all those people who do get our newsletter who have been praying over this situation. We picked the car up yesterday evening before picking up the first member of the Steinbach team at the airport. It is wonderful to have our independence back after months (since February) of sometimes borrowing mission car and driving the old Mercedes when we could get it.
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