Blogging Siaya: Fundi-mentalism and cheap labor

A week or two before I went home for Thanksgiving, we had some electricity fluctuations that had the lights flickering on and off. The next day, some of our laptops weren't charging, and the AC adapters were wet with something that smelled like antifreeze. There was another expat around the corner, also affected, who was just about to start training her staff--so this was not far from catastrophic. I despaired, and tried to get Finance to procure me a new power adapter ASAP but it seemed like it would take a few days or a personal trip to and from Kisumu.

Eventually, rummaging around our storeroom (I'm still not sure I know all it contains), I found the adapter for another laptop that put out the same voltage. The plug wasn't right for my computer's power jack, but I got an idea. "I bet," I thought to myself, "I can take these to the battery charging station and electronics repair shop across the street and have him splice the connector from the broken adapter onto the other one." I thought I was a genius.

This repair shop, by the way, is about the width of a closet.

I walked over, introduced myself to the owner, Shadrack, and explained what I wanted to do. He could do it, but wisely suggested checking the new charger to see if it put out a charge. It didn't. Darn.

Shadrack, once a lecturer at the college
across the street, now the proud owner of
a repair shop. Because it pays better.

But! that was not the end of the story. Shadrack was convinced he could repair the adapter. He pried it apart, revealing a small circuit board. Shadrack quickly determined one of the capacitors had burst and was leaking electrolytic fluid. An hour later he had cleaned it with solvent, let it dry, and put it back together--it worked like new and he charged me $1.50.

That was a shift in perspective. I had just been thinking of the charger as a black box of plastic stamped together on some Chinese assembly line. But clearly it was a device that could be understood and repaired. I quickly brought Shadrack the second burned out adapter.

It's a fairly commonplace belief that we now have a "disposable culture" in the US, which is different from how things once were. I don't think anyone is surprised to see poor people getting more use out of the little they have than the rich. My experience here certainly bear that out; in addition to fixing laptop chargers, people also eat organ meat (they call it matumbo).

The reason we throw things like burned out chargers out is that time (whether labor or convenience) is expensive, and things are cheap. In Siaya, the reverse is true: time is very cheap--most people can't find much work and their back up is working on a near-subsistence farm) but things are comparatively expensive. Especially manufactured and imported things.  

That is one of the most foreign things about being here; although directly linked to the poverty, the low cost of time and labor is more persistently jarring and odd to me than the outright destitution everywhere. I see it featuring in lots of little oddities of life: a beer or soda at the store costs as much as it does in the restaurant, for instance. Or when I offer to buy someone lunch, they are just as happy if I bring them a meal to-go after I have eaten as if I sat with them at a restaurant. Or people in general being very willing to wait around.

Siaya and environs are teeming with people like Shadrack, or like Boaz, my bike mechanic. There's a Swahili word, fundi, which more or less means "craftsman;" that's how anyone plying a trade like this is referred to. There is a tailors' row in Siaya town, and also a barbers' row. They are even out in the middle of nowhere. I was riding along a rural road, and my bike chain started slipping off every few hundred yards. The third time it happened, there was a mechanic sitting under a tree with his tools on the side of the road. He fixed the problem for 20 cents and I was back on my way.

Boaz, bike and motorbike fundi, also asks sharp questions
about American race relations.

 
One of the ways I have heard the story about disposability told is that in the glorious past, we built things to last and we knew how to take care of them. This may have been true of 1950s America, but it isn't really true here; most manufactures are of pretty poor quality. And it makes sense that they would be: that's how you make something cheap. The seat of my new bicycle was not well attached, and from the very get-go the chain occasionally loosening and starting to fall off repeatedly has been a problem. But when it costs 20 cents to fix, and there is a bike fundi at every other corner, it makes sense that the equilibrium is for low quality goods.