first work

This is the first, well, second day of actual work. Usually I just take a boda to a chosen part of town, walk around till I get tired, then grab a boda back to ntinde. But now we are working, not on the ferry, but odd jobs. Today we got to work at a mechanic shop. I feel perfectly at home in such a place. Surrounded by grease, car parts, and wrenches; that is where everything makes sense. Besides, the cars here are just different models of Japanese cars along with some land rovers. But cars are one area that is the same no matter where you go. Except here they never change oil, or nearly never.

So when the boss said we were going to go work at a mechanic shop I was ready in 10 minutes, sunscreen and all. A driver took us to the place across town cuz the truck henry normally drives needed a new clutch. (im not surprised. Everyone here drives very hard and they hold the car at stop with the clutch instead of the brakes. Oi.) Our job today was to fix up a metal trailer and get it ready for painting. Easy enough. Jp ground the metal. Leonard and opus sanded. I tackled the mechanical aspects of it. Oil can do amazing things with rusted parts. For a mechanic shop with about 7 workers, it didn’t have many tools. One set of wrenches, 3 hammers, etc, and no retractable knives. I thought they were standard for any sort of work. Instead they sharpen half a hacksaw blade. It works… sorta. And one of the hammers was a large bolt welded to the end of a rebar. So we filled up the flat tire, tugged the trailer into the shade and went to work. When we finally got thru the rusted locks, we found the inside filled with household stuff from the previous owner, all looking new. Every time customers came in they talked to us thinking we were in charge cuz we are white. So we would send them to the other white guy who actually owned the place.

Around lunch we were ready for a break so we sent opus, the only actual Ugandan among us, up the road to get food since he didn’t seem to have any problem walking around in the full sun. The rest of us sat in the shade cracking jokes. After an hour opus came back, saying he couldn’t find the chips we asked for. He was thinking the South African chips which we call French fries. He had brought back chips which he called crisps. Oh, and cookies are crackers. Not sure what biscuits are. But he also had little baggies of sealed yoghurt and fresh apples. Yay. Btw, how come everything comes in black plastic bags? Are we ashamed of our purchases of food?

After lunch all the steam for work left. Leonard needed to go home but he cant ride the bodas cuz of his balance issues, nor did he know which taxis to take. So we sent opus home with him. After another hour, jp’s headache worsened and his ipod ran out of battery. I could just see how much more we needed to get done and didn’t want to face it. That, and the shade was vanishing. We Americans are pathetic. So we closed up the trailer, I washed all the dirt and grease off my face (without a mirror of course, but I got to check in jp’s sunglasses;-) and left on a boda boda. We arrived 5 minutes before the others. I love bodas.