Day Twenty-Two: The Umbrella Repairman (4 July)
on From Banglatown to Bangladesh (Bangladesh), 19/Aug/2010 10:07, 34 days ago
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The repairman sits on a raised wooden platform, covered by a tin and bamboo roof, and surrounded by torches, threads, and other tools and products of his trade. He, along with the two or three fellow repairmen sitting beside him (Bangladesh is one of those countries where services seem to come in a row), earn their incomes through the provision of quick, affordable fixes: of umbrellas, of lamps, of a variety of other small but very useful goods in this country of monsoons and power shortages.Today’s positive isn’t really about the umbrella repairman himself, although he could indeed be a very pleasant man. More it’s the fact that you can get umbrellas repaired at all in this country. I mentioned this to someone from the UK a few months ago. He was amazed at the possibility. In theUK, I assume, a broken umbrella is something to be discarded, to end up in a landfill at worst, or, at best, its parts sent thousands of miles away to a recycling plant in China.Here, however, an umbrella is definitely something to be repaired. Mine’s been done twice now; a tweak here, a few additional threads there, and it’s keeping me dry again. And this is the positive: Bangladesh excels at the ‘re-use’ component of that ‘reduce, re-use, recycle’ mantra I remember from school days.Because while piles of thrown-on-the-ground rubbish do line far too many of the streets in Bangladesh, you can be sure, if something can be re-used, it will be. Paper and plastic bottles are collected by those unable to access other income sources, and sold on, for small amounts. Pages from school exercise books are made into small bags, used for the selling of street-side snacks and small purchases from grocery shops. A recent trip through a garment factory-area showed mountains of discarded pieces of cloth; they may be in piles for now, but rest assured, they will be picked up, and re-used by someone who needs them.The poverty that lies behind this emphasis on re-using is, of course, not a positive. Re-using is not a choice of ethics here, but an essential. We may have clean streets, organised rubbish and recycling collections, and an aversion to throwing trash out bus windows, but still, I await the day umbrella repairmen come to the UK. That really will be a positive.
