The Long and Winding Road for the 5 Amp Fuse

Been a little while since I did a blog post... I guess I have gotten so swept away by this culture that I have forgotten about all of you back home. Haha just kidding! Hope everyone is doing well.

Sometimes I just feel that little anecdotes are the best way to give you insight into how things run around here. Hence “The Long and Winding Road for the 5 amp fuse”.

 

The electricity here in Tanzania is “dirty” (if you have electricity at all… I am in the minority group for having it. Lucky me!). This means that there are occasionally power surges. These power surges can destroy electrical equipment if left unchecked. Hence the “Voltage Regulator Box”. It acts to stop surges before they affect equipment.  But sometimes there are current surges and like most electrical equipment, there is a fuse that gets “sacrificed” to break the current and hence protect the rest of the apparatus. This fuse blew a little while back. I finally went shopping for one last week.

 

One tiny fuse. Something so common. Yet I knew going into it that it would be a several hour journey to find it. You can’t just read the signs above the isles as you would at Home Depot or Lowes. But journeys of this sort, although long and occasionally frustrating, are quite fun and adventurous from my perspective.

 

To start, I went to the section of town where most of the electronic stores are. When I say stores, I mean 10 ft by 10ft overcrowded hole in the wall sheds that are all linked together on the dusty and hot streets of Tanga. I go around from “shed” to “shed” looking for the fuse, using my choppy Swahili and holding up the one that has been blown. It isn’t like I just go from one store to another at random. Rather, one store owner directs me to the next one, who then directs me to another one, who then directs me back to the one I just came from. Ha! It’s on store number five that I finally make a break through. A store owner who is working on a chip for a broken CD player directs me to a store several blocks away that he has confidence in. I end up making a wrong turn and turn around when I realize I am moving from the commercial section of town to the residential section. I finally find the store and this store owner does not have the fuse. He then directs me to another store (store number seven). He is positive this place will have it. But I get there and it’s closed for the day. I let my hands hang over the metal casing that is brought down over the store front to protect it when it’s closed. A local sees my frustration and says we can go and find the owner. We end up going to his house, which was in the residential section of town where I had originally gotten lost.

 

The owner says he will come open the shop, which I am grateful for. After a half hour of sitting on a street curb and talking in choppy Swahili to the local, the owner comes and opens up. I am looking for a 5 amp fuse. He has 4 and 6. Haaa! Just my day. I take the 4 and the 6 and find out online later that it is ok to use a lower rated fuse on your electronics but not a higher rating. I also talk to my dad about this when he calls as he is familiar with these types of things. So here I am typing to you with the voltage box  back up and running smoothly again! Using a 4 amp fuse instead of the 5. It probably won’t last as long as a 5 would, but we will see. Hope all of you in the states are doing well!