Jonathan
Just A Drip
An African Carpenter

Sunday 06/05/07
Carpenter Jonathan does one of his no shows without prior notice, his cell phone switched off. Philemon caulks the deck and hunts for fishing hooks and worms. I am looking forward to the first fish caught right from my own ship

.

Photo: Philemon (Standing In The Canoe)

I buy a big bag of rubber bands (mine has been stolen in Mwanza looting orgy) and a marker to bind and sort my electric wires, connectors and gadgets. The box with Hi Fi connectors turns out to be stolen in the Mwanza looting orgy.

Monday 06/05/08
Jonathan shows up! He starts making the royal captain's desk and storage shelves starboard. Philemon caulks.

Jinja Week 7

Tuesday 06/05/09
I bring Jonathan to the workshop for some wood cutting and planing. As more often the last week, the prices he quotes for the jobs seem astronomical to Jinja standards. But when I say that, he insists that is the price. He proposes I will not phone him, but he will phone me when he is ready because it is noisy in the workshop and his battery is bad so he'd better only switch on when he wants to call. After doing my own business and waiting for an hour in 2 Friends I seem to scent a fishy smell and go to the workshop. The wood is just lying on the ground. No Jonathan.
I phone: Jonathan: where are you?
At the workshop, I will call you when I am ready.
No you are not, I am at the workshop.
The line breaks. I call again. The user is switched off. I SMS: WOOD JUST LYING HERE, WHERE ARE YOU?
Jonathan calls to repeat he is at "Spire Road" (the workshop), I repeat that I am there and I see he is not. The line breaks again. Battery of "battery"?
I SMS again WHERE ARE YOU, CALL ME NOW.
Jonathan calls, I repeat he is not where he says he is, Jonathan now claims he is at another workshop Spire Road 42.
I run to 42. No Jonathan. I SMS again.
Jonathan calls: I am coming.
When I arrive back at Jonathan's own workshop he arrives. From another side.
What were you doing there?
Ehmmm, looking for wood for your toilet.
Jonathan, you have no orders for that, you not know how I want to construe the toilet support, and the wood is for sale in your own workshop, come on, you are an honest man, what were you doing?
I was doing a little something (he laughs naughtily).
I left it there and then, buying time to get used to the true Jonathan I now started to discover.
Was the "little something" done with the excess price for cutting and planing he had obviously charged me?
Back on the dhow Jonathan finished desk and storage shelves starboard.

Photo:  on my brand new desk just after having finished it.

Photo:  An Historical Moment For The First Time, We Catch, Fry And Eat Our Own Tilapia (Kindly Observe The Elegant Kitchen Dry-Rack - Mounted 1.5 m, Full Width Above the Metal Sink And Dresser- On The Middle Photo)

Wednesday 06/05/10
We improve the main cabin stairs construction. We mount edges around all storage shelves, buy fishnet to professionalize our fishing, and a blanket for caulking according to the Tanzanian tradition the wide seams of Jonathan's hatches .

Photo: Tanzanian Caulking: Strips Of Blanket Are Hammered In The Seams Between Hatch Planks, Just As We Did (In Mwanza) With The Hull

and we drill more holes for deck drainage pipes on all deck levels through the boards.

Thursday 06/05/11
Today, of course, I would not to leave the buying and cutting of wood to Jonathan. I would stay next to him, make sure we would not buy and hire cutting and planing labour too expensively, and prevent Jonathan sneaking out for an hour or two to do his business while I would be doing my own. The results of this new approach were truly amazing - although I should long have been wise enough not to be amazed at all. But let me first commit myself to a digression on Jonathan, details of which derive their interest from what I learned today about how his brain is operating.
The intricacies of being the employer of an African carpenter: like any African craftsman, Jonathan does not want to be paid a fixed amount per day. This is not how you do in Uganda. Instead, after some job is done, you discuss, haggle its value, using for the ritual an amount of time appropriate to the weight of the job and the friendship. At the end of days on which jobs are not yet finished, you pay "advance" to the craftsman to "survive". The first day, advance asked will be below the value of the day's work. Then, when you become "friends", "advance"-requests will intensify. If you do not limit it, the craftsman's debts it will reach the stage where no man in his senses can believe the craftsman will ever be able to return it. The man himself will be unaware of the situation arising due to absence of proper calculation skills or, if this absence is below standard: amazingly effective repression of the issue to some well hidden refuse dump in his African brain. It requires a good control of African rhetoric to stay out of that predicament: your craftsman will file urgent, nay extremely urgent needs. When the debt rises, the urgency claims rise from the simple "nothing to eat" (which can be ignored) to the level of doctor's money for lethally dangerous diseases of relatives, in the end even of near, nay very near relatives. Your African rhetoric should now retaliate by coming up with other dangers, like the worries debts create for debtor and creditor, the need for everybody to make ends meet under the existing earning capacity - well above average in my carpenter Jonathan's case - and an absolute credit limit. The craftsman will agree, but the limit has to be made an absolute absolute limit after he concocted an unheard of, record urgency claim to trespass. Jonathan for instance called last Saturday to say he unexpectedly over-spent 30 000 ("child, nay own, really own, sure, yes, child, malaria, almost died", top urgency rhetoric, might even be true in some cases), and needed the money to go as planned, that day, with Philemon, to his brother's marriage. I resigned and gave the money, so he was 20 000 over his limit, solemnly agreed in a one hour discussion one day before, of 100 000 (two weeks work). 100 000 is only 45 euro, but this is Africa. This means you will speak roughly two hours (the time length of the conversation should reflect the intensity of the friendship) about the need, say, to limit in practice debts on 50 000 in order to keep 50 000 of the absolute absolute absolute credit limit free for absolute absolute urgencies the ones that, even though the truth may be slightly more subtle, require speech about sickness and death of close close close relatives .

Photo: Jonathan in his carpentry work shop. Death, as you see, has, in Uganda, clearly the features of a traffic jam, but for every one person exported in a small handsomely windowed hut like this, four children are born in Uganda.
The government considers that - with wide public approval -  not as a problem but as one of its achievements, though the wood for all this being born, living and dying is running out.

So, today, I decide not anymore to leave to Jonathan, who describes himself as a certified, schooled carpenter, and speaks about his colleagues at the workshop as "illiterates" (!!), the business of buying, cutting and planing wood. I do not give him money but join him in the workshop.

Photo: Jonathan at work in the dhow's main cabin. He never needs to be said to say cheese: photo or not, he always says cheese.

On arrival at the wood seller's corner he shows the two planks we need and quotes USh 25000/=.
No Jonathan, I am not crazy.
Jonathan insists this is the price.
Then we go from here, Jonathan, other workshops do not sell me for such astronomically overcharge mzungu prices.
Just before leaving the premises Jonathan suggests another friend-wood seller. This man agrees for half the price.
Now, Jonathan, you see. And you know the prices. You are cheating me!
No, I am a carpenter.
No, you are cheating me, and I DO NOT LIKE THAT! (I am shouting, I want people in the noisy place to hear what I am saying).
Now, Jonathan, I want to hear what the cutters and planers are going to charge us, if it is too much, we go from here!
4000.
Jonathan, I am NOT CRAZY, I AM NOT PAYING MZUNGU PRICES!
OK. 500 per cut and 2000 for the planing.
At the last cut and half way the planing power goes off.
We have to wait.
No Jonathan, it can take more than one day before power comes back, remember today we have power officially, so this is power cut, tomorrow we do not, so tomorrow's absence of power will be called power shedding. We shall board the dhow right now and finish cutting and planing by hand.
I leave after paying 33 000, which would have been, in my rough estimate, 80 000 had I left the business to Jonathan. Moreover, there would probably not have been any cutting and planing at all, since Jonathan would have been doing his own little businesses with the excess money he would have charged me while my wood would be lying waiting for the power cut to come.
Jonathan, you have been cheating. I made a great mistake to trust you, what do you think, would I have lent you 100 000 for your boy's school fees had I known you are a man like this?
No, I am sorry, but...
Do not talk, Jonathan, it's no use. When you speak the truth, I know you do, when you lie, I know you do. You gain no more chance by trying to say something. That is over. Now I am the one who is doing the talking. And I tell you, I am going to forgive you once you cleared your debt by working, but I need time to cool down, I am still very angry.
Thank you.
 

Photo: Removing unwanted timber remains, left background:  650 W Tiger generator (bad, � 70) and 650 W ("Real!") Yamaha (good, � 135). The real ("Real!") Yamaha, bought after the Tiger started to break fuses by producing steep split second voltage surges, was a risky purchase, surrounded with suspicion since a ("Real Real!") serious little Honda generator is � 1300 everywhere around the lake. But the Yamaha or "Yamaha" never refuses and produces a stable voltage. When forgery includes performance, who cares? May be it's real?

Photo: Home, with left to right baby 1 (one year), sister in law, baby 2 (few months), wife. Two more children at school

Jonathan. You cannot blame him. Like many East African adults, he has the brain of a child, to western standards. That is how they drive, how they steal and rob, how they fight wars. 16 year olds, even less. The key feature of such a brain that it ranges only over a very short stretch of space and time. They stay clear of the sausage on the kitchen table as long as the owner is home and watching. But as soon as the owner is gone, the sausage goes down. It is as simple as that. Restraint can hold only under your physical presence. And the one to blame for the loss of any sausages is the owner who failed to lock them. The many many Jonathans of Africa cannot be blamed. They are like Adam and Eve in paradise. No sins, no responsibility, at least not more than that of for instance the dog, whose predicament in relation to the kitchen sausage is strikingly similar.

Friday 06/05/12

Photo:  Fitting A Shelve Around The Shire Polyhedron

Will you kill your dog after it took an unlocked sausage or will you punish it and be friends again? I love Jonathan. I could not do him any harm above what is strictly necessary to check him.

Photo:  Passing Dhow Under Menacing Thunder Storm. My Camera Assumes A Breitner Style When You Apply The Digital Zoom

At night, Philemon puts his (mine? - I paid) new fishnet out:

Photo:  stepping up professionalism in fishing

but it is full moon. The tilapia can see the net and jump over it. Philemon watches it, laughing, on his own, in the moonlight. No fish today. Later, he tells me he has once seen tilapia going flat on one side on the lake bottom to let a trailnet pass.

Photo: A Catch From Big Shoal Of Furu Around The Dhow.

But the fish we (Philemon that is) catch most is furu, the fish claimed by Dutch author Tijs Goldschmidt and the big success movie "Darwins Nightmare" to be hunted to extinction by the Nile perch (another occurrence of furu). They are tastier than sato (tilapia), but, more important, their bones get crispy in hot oil, so you eat the entire furu, head and tail, as a piece of toast. We simply cannot eat them all, so the good Philemon changes the excess in the village for soap for his mother and wife.

Saturday 06/05/13
The cheap band sander I bought to clean the deck is 800 W. Stupid me, my generator is only 650. Tool supermarket Game Kampala gives me my money back to buy a 600 W Bosch, for twice the price, but what the heck, tools are never too expensive. Game has now on display even two 12 V fridges using 7.5 and 5 Amps respectively, for the same price as my brand new 230 V fridge that uses 1 Amp on 230 V, an Amp that a 12 V battery can only produce using 20 Amps, three to four times as much, I can pull all hairs off my skull. Sell it, the only opportunity to structurally cool some beer, wine, cheese (and...bread, as you have to do here to prevent it from acquiring fungus in a few hours).
I take the opportunity of being in Kampala to replace my stolen espresso coffee cooker in the only shop in Kampala that features them, today even the very last one. That is, I think proudly: I entered a multi million city to go straight to the only shop with the only shelve featuring the 1 (one, single) espresso cooker for sale in Kampala today!
Jonathan made a curious move at sunset: when Philemon boarded the canoe to collect me, returning from Kampala, from the harbour village, he did not join him to go home. Philemon did not know why. I suspected begging for money. But he did not! He simply pointed out his jobs: he had mounted the remaining locks of the hatches and a stairs step between steering deck and main deck.  He has one or two days of jobs on the dhow, not enough to clear his debts. He does not know. I suspect he simply thinks he is going to work here forever as my permanent carpenter. But he won't. He will remain with debts to me, certainly when I add the roughly 200 000 of cheating. He does not know I am going to let him off the hook, may be not even that, as it stands, he is still on it.
After having mentioned to me his work of the day, Jonathan asked Philemon to bring him ashore. Philemon patiently set out to do his second, unnecessary, beach trip. I took the ritual to be: hoping for money, refraining from begging to avoid my anger.
Philemon had been caulking and removing superfluous paint and paint stains from the hatches, to prepare for some layers of acrylic clear two component paint that should secure us from every little drop of rain, even in the worst of tropical rainstorms.
Building this dhow was a true war, but it seems over. There is some work left, but that will remain so forever, as on every ship.
I cook my first goat with rice. We can start thinking of inviting guests.

Sunday 06/05/14
Jonathan is early again. But it "is not good". His wife had been to a clinic, this time not because of "heart beat", but because of "stomach". Jonathan rubs his stomach with the ugliest face he can make to illustrate the problem. He needs money.
Is she back home Jonathan?
Yes.
Who was paying the doctor?
He was helping us, he is our doctor. Now he needs money.
So, now the doctor is lending you. Good, it should not always be me. Your debts with me have gone down from 120 000 to 30 000 by working. Soon they will be cleared.
Thank you.
We start working at the support for a movable table, forcedly interrupted by a true test for our deck: an over 60 mm rainstorm.

Photo: 60 mm Rain On Our Deck (4000 Liters, 266 Buckets) In Half An Hour

Very few leaks are seen, the ceiling under the pond on the photo above is even completely dry.
Waiting for the rain to stop, Jonathan comes back to his wife's stomach and money needs.
Jonathan, no more begging, you know I am still cooling down, I am still angry because of your cheating.
After an hour, the rain is ending. I give Jonathan the usual 2000 for transport home, and back tomorrow.
Jonathan looks at the money. "Yes, but I want assistance".
Jonathan, now I am fed up with it. We all have problems. Philemon has problems, I have problems. We are sick of always only talking about your problems. You still owe me 30 000, plus the cheating I would have been ready to forgive you once you had cleared your debts by working. I will bring you to the shore and you will not come back. It is over.
Forgive me.
I will.
Thank you.
After boarding the canoe, half filled with rainwater, Jonathan starts to scoop. I take a big bucket to do the same. There we sit, together in the half sunk canoe, scooping.
I paddle him to the harbour village.
Jonathan, thank you, I will remember your jobs and forget about your cheating, borrowing and begging.
Thank you.
Relieved, I paddle back to the boat.
Philemon turns out, like me, not to be sure whether Jonathan's wife really feels a stomach ache.
We are not going to check.

SMS received  060514-15:56 from Jonathan the "literate"

I Promis not to borrow or bag again. what i will be working for you will be paying for. I swaer, Jonathan.

SMS reply:

Well done, but you are fired. I wish you well.