pandastan

So I mentioned last post how I discovered a local child was sneaking through my window and stealing various small household items. My solution was to weld extra pieces of metal to the windows to make the gaps smaller, but this was a headier task than I had anticipated. The first step was getting the pieces of metal. It took a trip 15 km to Uliwa and some haggling, but wasn't too difficult. My neighbor told me that some people would be coming in a few days to do some repairs on the health center and that they would have a welding machine with them. So, I wiated for them to come, but surprise surprise, they never came. A few weeks had passed by this time, and I started getting nervous because I needed to get this welding done before I left town again for a while. I ran across this electrician who claimed he would do the welding for me. He agreed to come by Saturday, but couldn't say what time on Saturday it would be. He also told my neighbor I could expect him on Saturday as well. So I waited around the house all day on Saturday, and surprise surprise! He never came. Apparently there was a football match on t.v. that day, so all other concerns were abandoned; I thought that was the reason he didn't come, but he never came Sunday or Monday either. Finally on Tuesday, I asked someone if they knew who this guy was. I was instructed to seek out a local restaurant owner and ask to be put in touch with him since he apparently lives near to there.



On my way to the restaurant, I stopped in to talk to someone else I know, and mentioned my plight. He told me that this electrician did not do welding and wasn't sure why he told me that he did. According to him, there was only one man in the village who had a welding machine, and that he lives "over by the school." (2 km away. Although this guy owns the machine, he doesn't know how to weld himself, but hires another guy to do it, who is apparently the only guy in town skilled at welding. I went out in search of this man with the machine; I went to a bar next to the school and asked if they knew where he was. They gave me vague directions to go further up the road. I stopped at a house further up the road, and the guy who lived there escorted me behind his house, through a maze of other homesteads, asking people along the way. After a while, we arrived at a house that was where this man lives. We waited while he was summoned for 10 minutes or so, and then he arrived. I explained my need for a welder. He told me to follow him. We went back across the school grounds and arrived at a shed next to the bar I started at. He talked to someone else, and was informed that the man who has the key to the shed was "far away." Eventually I gathered that the welding machine was in this shed.
So I suggested that we do the welding on another day, not having expected to arrange it immediately anyway. He asked when. "How about tomorrow?" I threw that out, instinctively trying the soonest possible time. He said yes, but that it should be in the morning. I taught a class in the morning, but I thought it would be unwise to contradict him. Maybe there was some special reason the morning would work. In Malawian culture, people don't like to disagree with you, so if I suggested the afternoon, and the afternoon was impossible for some reason, it would be most likely that he would just agree with me and then it would never happen. He said that he and the welder would be by at 7 or 730 am. I said ok, and went back home.

I put the odds of someone actually showing up at around 15%, and had given up entirely on it by about 9:20. I was about to start preparing for my 10:40 class when two men show up with a bundle of metal coils and wires. Neither of them were the man I spoke to the day before; one of them was the welder, and the other was someone who had a bicycle and had helped him transport the machine there. He asked how we were going to plug it in, and I said my neighbor (who has electricity) said we could plug it in there. he asked if I had an extension cord. I didn't. Well, what were we going to do? I started panicking - how would we find one? I aksed my neighbor, who told me to ask the health center groundskeeper. The groundkeeper told me to ask the carpenter next door. The carpenter had one, and would normally never lend it out, but decided to make an exception in my case. I had a cord! I rushed back with the cord. I showed the welder the metal pieces I had and what I wanted done. He said that was fine, but he didn't have a hacksaw, which he needed to cut them to size. He would have to go to the road block where he could borrow one. I said ok and he took off.

I rushed to the school and told them I would have to cancel my class. No problem. ok, good. I rushed back home and waited. He finally came back at 11:00 with the hacksaw and got to work. At this point, I need to describe the welding machine. I had almost zero knowledge of welding before this, and didn't know what to expect. The machine, was a lump of metal coils weighing about 30 or 40 pounds interlaced with pieces of wood. It had three cords coming out of it. One was the plug, which instead of having a plug, just had two bare wires that had to be jammed into the end of the extension cord. Another wire led to a malformed lump of metal. The other wire led to a metal clamp which had lost its clamping capability. I had to surrender a rag to the welder so he could tear it into strips and wrap the strips around the metal handle so he could hold it. He also wrapped a strip around the welding rod because the clamp wouldn't hold it and he couldn't touch it with his fingers of course. He would take the clamp in his left hand and hold the welding rod in his right hand so it was touching the clamp at one end. The other end would be moved over to the aforementioned lump of metal connected to a wire. When they touched, there would be many sparks, until the tip of the welding rod was red. Then it would be ready to weld.

Remember, his hands are both full, so how were we going to hold the metal bars in place that I wanted welded to the existing metal frame? He suggested that I wrap a strip of cloth around the piece and hold it with my hands. I suggested that we tie a string around the metal bar, which I would hold taut on the far side of the room, pulling the bar towards the window frame to hold it in place, which is what we did. Now, the welder had no protective equipment whatsoever, in fact, he was wearing a tank top, shorts and flip flops. His method for protecting his face while the sparks were flying from the welding was to close his eyes as the welding rod came into contact with the metal. So I was standing inside the house at the far end of the room holding a string attached to a piece of metal while we was welding with his eyes shut. Over the course of the job, he explained that he had been studying mechanical engineering at Phwezi technical college (60 km south) but ran out of money to pay for it, so now he was stuck in Chitimba and losing hope, looking for odd jobs to get money. This high risk welding job itself was going to net him less than five dollars. At various times during the welding, the rag he had wrapped around the welding rod would catch fire and he would have to throw it on the ground and find a new piece of rag. Meanwhile, the welding terrified my cat, the creature who made this whole absurd procedure necessary in the first place. It was several days before she was comfortable enough to stay in the house again. She sensed that somehow the evil sparks were made possible by the extension cord and I filmed a very funny sequence of her tapping the cord with her paw and jumping away each time as if it was shocking her. But I was unable to upload it to my web album. Oh well

After it was all over, the welder explained that he had to track down another bicycle in order to transport the welding machine out of my house. He would be back at 2 or 3 o'clock. That was five days ago. As of now, the welding machine is still in my house, and I'm wondering what to do about it since I'm leaving town for a while on Wednesday.

Vegetable news: After planting 9 kinds of seeds at four various intervals; constructing specially designed seed beds, using chicken manure in the soil, constructing grass coverings to shield seedlings from the sunlight, watering every day for some periods of time, trying fertilizer instead of manure, building a fence to keep chickens out, rebuilding the fence when the first one collapsed, desperately planting eggplants, onions, green peppers, garlic and tomatoes from food I had bought in the market after my store bought seeds continued to fail, and wondering what kind of thumb is the opposite of "green," my garden has yielded: squash! The only thing that agreed to grow. I've included pictures of the prolific squash plants, and the biggest squash fruit on the vine currently. I harvested one that had turned the appropriate color - I dug through a pile of things and discovered I still had the seed package although all the seeds are gone - and discovered they are butternut squash, and they are supposed to look brownish orange when they are done. My brownish orange squash was a little smaller than I thought it should be, but it tasted right: I steamed it, after much frustration involving my steaming equipment that involved swearing and screaming and smashing things. My neighbor came by to make sure i was ok. But it eventually worked. There are a few more fruits on the vine, so I should have a few more nights of squash eating before the squash plants reach the end of the line. Well, it may be a limited success, but I can now say truthfully that I have grown a vegetable.

Here are the latest pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/yenwela/SquashWelding# To explain: Malawians seem to be uniformly deathly afraid of snakes and people are always bugging me to keep long grasses short and sweep up any debris that snakes could be hiding under. While cutting some lemon grass in my yard, I didn't find a snake, but did find this lizard, which I then photographed. There is a picture of the welding machine, next to a paperback for scale. Also, pictures of the window that was welded from far away and close up. The same paperback is also there for scale so you can see how small the gap was that the thief-child was crawling through. And there are two pictures of squash to display my lone gardening success.

Enough! or too much