Easy Fixes

Our toilet has the small problem that when the flow of water is low, the reservoir doesn’t fill with water. Unfortunately this small problem becomes quite large and odorous when one considers the fact that the flow from the water tower is always just above a trickle and frequently intermittent. Last week, after tiring of the stench emanating from our bathroom, I decided to fix the toilet. Solution: it was easy. I bought a bucket. Now we have a flush toilet again.

Malawi is full of easy solutions. Got a flat bicycle tire? Don’t buy a new tube, just get some sticky glue stored in an old penicillin bottle, apply it to the affected area, and slap on a cut up piece of an old tire tube. Repeat thirty times as necessary. Then, when you are ready to fill your newly-fixed tube with air, don’t bother finding a bicycle pump that actually fits the valve on your tube; simply find a scrap of plastic bag (called 'plastic paper') and wrap it around the valve until you have a nice tight fit. Works every time.

Each Sunday I am greeted by a colorful collage decorating the bushes around the girls’ hostel. Lacking a clothesline, the girls drape their clothes over the neatly trimmed hedges when it comes time to dry their laundry. Walking down to the beach, the sight is the same as women bedeck the sand with skirts, shirts, and chitenjes. No need to spend money on a piece of string to hang clothes, when the sand is hot and brushes off when dried.

The school has recently been having a shortage of blackboard erasers (called ‘dusters’). Each class tends to go through an entire duster in about 2 weeks and with 8 classes and a limited budget, the expense was just getting too high. At one point three classrooms were sharing the same duster so that each time I filled the board I would have to send a student out to go search for a way to erase it. The school’s simple solution was to contract the tailoring shop to sew new duster pads stuffed with scraps of cloth. These lasted about three weeks before they started bursting open under the strain, spilling their innards onto the floor. I now erase the board with a duster bearing close resemblance to a spider puppet with too many legs.

Innovative fixes are so common here that Gracious Secondary school found it necessary to include in its school rules “Do not make dangerous electrical connections.” alongside the old standbys of “Show respect to teachers.” and “Do not bring cell phones to school.” Since our hut is not technically on school property, Jesse has decided to follow a more Malawian approach to our broken electrical appliances. He fixed the plug on our electric water boiler by installing a new fuse (after first electrifying the ground circuit of the entire house so that anyone who touched the refrigerator received a rather large shock) and when I accidentally cut through the computer power cable by smushing it with the sharpened leg of my chair, he cut the cord, stripped the two ends and wrapped the wires back together. Of course, we don’t have any electrical tape so any movement of the computer cord now runs the risk of shorting out the power converter. But don’t worry, we’re not trying to burn down the hut.

While many cultures spend their creative power in intricate weavings or beautiful pottery, Malawians have put theirs to use to treat problems for which they simply don’t have the money to solve the original cause. Coming from a culture that prefers to throw away broken problems and start anew, living here has done more for my appreciation of the value of reuse than any well-intentioned “save the planet” speech. I save all of our plastic bags so that I have trash bags and grocery bags. I save all of our paper scraps so that we have fire starting material. I hold onto cardboard, plastic containers, and even bits of string in case I can find a use for them in any of my classes. It’s been fun to try to come up with creative ways to use supplies I might have otherwise thrown away. I’ll have to add the skill to the quietly growing list of things I’ve learned from living in Malawi.