Monday, September 19, 2011

The gears just aren't meshing.

One of those days where life is just so much  more frustrating here than, well, than a lot of other places. I'd planned to go out to Obule but in the first 10 minutes the chain on my bike wrenched off three times. At that rate it was going to take me hours to get there so I called them then turned back toward home.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume this might have something to do with it. (I'm pretty sure the gear teeth are supposed to go in the chain, not next to it.) So I took the bike to the mechanic who said no problem, he could fix it. He then proceeded to hit the gears with a hammer to get the teeth to line up again. Right then, not what I was thinking. So after asking about replacing gears instead of just pounding on them and hearing that it was going to take more than 150,000 USH in parts I decided to wait and see if a better idea comes to me. The issue is that fixed gear bikes are the norm here. There are bikes around that have cogsets and derailleurs but they are pretty uncommon and most often they don't work well, probably because parts cost an arm and a leg and they try to fix them by hitting them with a hammer. So I went from there over to the electrician who is "working" on my inverter.  (With the power coming and going all the time it would be really nice to be able to charge things off our car battery again.) He has been "working" on it for more than a week now so I go everyday to see how it is coming along and I've never actually seen him working. Last week he was going to go to Kampala to get the parts. Today he was back in the shop but told me he couldn't work on it as he was too tired after traveling to Kampala and back and that I could come back again to check tomorrow.
So from there over to the bank- ATM isn't working. Then to the book store- no English bibles in stock. At this point I realized I was accomplishing nothing so I was just going to head back home. That's life here. One would think it wouldn't surprise or frustrate me anymore. But it still does. I just want one thing to take LESS time than I thought it would.

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