We had a repair man come and fix our generator yesterday and I thought I would share some differences about that with you. First of all Joseph (a man who works for us around the house) went to town and found him in a garage. He said that the garage repairs all sorts of mechanical things, lawn mowers, motorcycles, generators, etc. It is unusual because if someone comes to your house to fix something they usually come by the “dala dala” African bus where they literally pile people on top of each other, and then the repair person walks. So for starters the way the person gets to your house is different. Well the man, named Bensen, came right at lunch time. It is custom for people not to bring their lunch to work. In fact, if I told a Tanzanian that people in America had to bring their own lunch to work, they would laugh. From what I have seen here, the employer always supplies food for the worker. So when he came at lunch time we made an extra bowl of food and gave it to him to eat before he started his work. When he was ready to work did he get out his big bag of tools?, nope, he asked where ours were. Yes a repair man not having any tools. I would have thought that this was usual if I hadn’t already seen it with the plumber that came to fix our sink, or the electrician that came to look at the power box. Both times they came without any tools, they just used whatever we happen to have on hand. I am thankful that we have a good verity of tools around the house for the repair people to fix stuff. He had to go to town for a new part and he asked for money because he didn’t have any. He explained what was wrong with the generator and I made sure to see how much the whole thing was going to cost. Sometimes a repair person waits until the job is finished and gives you a really big price and then you have to negotiate to a reasonable price. We did the negotiations beforehand. (By the way Carey wasn’t here or he would have done all this. ) Oh and by the way this was all in Swhaili because he didn’t understand any English. I was able to understand enough. His trip into town took to rest of the day, and he returned just before early evening. By the end of the day the generator was fixed, and all was well. (Smiles)
To me this was just a normal day so I even feel silly blogging about it, but I thought that some of these differences might interest someone.
Until Next Time,
Bonnie
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