Our Own Fix-it Shop

Question: What do you do if something you bought in the US breaks when you get it to Uganda? There are no repairmen for this item in the whole country. There is no place to get parts. How do you deal with it?

You figure out how to fix it yourself. 

Ugandan furniture isn’t the same quality as American. But even more importantly, it’s short. Much shorter than the tall people who live at my house. We tried it when we first arrived here and discovered it wasn’t all that comfortable.

So, back in 2015, when we shipped our container of books, we had enough room to include some furniture from America, furniture that would be tall enough for all our tall people here.

Due to a variety of circumstance that I won’t go into here, half of the loveseat/recliner broke. A metal piece bent and we couldn’t figure out a way to get it straight again. It eventually reached the point where it was uncomfortable to use.

It’s frustrating to have something like that in your house, a constant reminder that no one around has the expertise to make a needed repair, simply by virtue of the fact that they’ve never encountered it. After a long, think-outside-the-box discussion a couple weeks ago, James decided to make another go at figuring out how to fix it.

He and Ethan took the chair apart and figured out a way to straighten the metal pieces that were bent. Then they put the whole thing together again. The lever that raised the footrest had broken a while ago (It’s plastic, and apparently breaks easily; but I reference the long story I didn’t go into above). They rigged it to work again until we could get a replacement part for it.

It took a couple hours, but the chair is usable again. It’s one less thing to have as a niggling stress always in the background. And we can again enjoy this thing God provided for us!