Chez le Mécanicien

Hey all!

Let’s take a trip to the mechanic’s today, village style!

So I’ve already mentioned that in village, if you have a mode of transportation, most often it’s either your feet or a bike. And despite road conditions, we’re not talking about mountain bikes. We’re talking about single gear, often old, often twisted and often Chinese city bikes. The kinds with thin tires and no tread, a platform over the back tire (the bed) for your bigger loads and sometimes even a basket in front, convenient for transporting chickens or “la sauce” (as a side note, I always get a kick out of the fact that in general people refer to any kind of green vegetable as being “the sauce”!) . These are bikes abused to no end on all kinds of roads and paths leading into the Savannah bush villages. The elaborate network of dirt roads/paths are rocky, sandy, eroded and, right now, sometimes water logged. But the bikes manage to pull through it all more often than not. But what happens when the bikes finally do break down?

Usually, a trip to the mechanic's means you’ve exhausted all of your MacGyver-esque techniques. Most people are their own mechanic, but sometimes they just don’t have the tools or the broken part to do the trick. But believe me, if they can jerry rig it to avoid a fee, they will! I think the niftiest piece of work I’ve seen yet was how we once repaired a flat tire of someone while on the path. We had no patches to work with, but what we did have was a long rubber “caoutchouc”, our bungee cord, standard on all bikes. It’s what we use to strap things to our bikes. Without them we wouldn’t be able to manage to carry so much on our bikes, like 50 kilo sacks of fertilizer or bed frames! I’m amazed by how much a bike can carry if you really want it to! Anyway, after locating the hole by rotating the tube through a bucket of water, they pinched the spot of the whole, making a bit of an earflap, and then tied it off tightly with a thin strip of this caoutchouc. They pumped it up and it was ready to go. Sure it was an awkward looking thing that patched inner tube, but sure enough it took us all the way back to village and to the above pictured mechanic shop.

Now yes, there is a motorcycle mechanic in village for those who do have the chance to own a moto. But for the large majority who move around on bikes, this and one other stall next door suffice as our auto body shops. And just like our frustrations with mechanic shops at home with our cars, people here are subject to similar pains with their bikes. I’ll hear people moan about the money they have to spend or the wait they have to endure to get their bikes back on the trail and I can’t help but chuckle and think of how in a way, it’s just like home. Haha!

For those pictured here, fortunately it’s still early on market day and things haven’t yet filled up. But believe me, by noon that same day the lot will be chock full of upturned bikes waiting to be tended too. In that case, take a seat at a tchakba stand, grab a calabash and “patientez un peu pour le mécanicien”.