I was working with a local carpenter getting him to build a staircase in the children's main bedroom. Wooden staircases were stock in trade for us out of my shop in St. Croix but something of a rarity here. Most internal structures are made of the same stuff as outside - concrete. So I was giving a class in how to lay out the run and rise of the stairs. We were getting to the point of designing the balusters, which were going to be simple wooden slats attached to the stringer of the stairs and the flat wooden railing.

I am accustomed to cordless drills and either Philips head or square drive screws. I had brought a few Philips head screws with me and sent the carpenter into town to buy more. There are no large hardware emporiums like Home Depot or Lowe's, only little hole-in-the wall shops stocked to the rafters with an assortment of tools, paint, glues, and screws. Masaka is a reasonably big city for Uganda, around 50,000 people call it home. I was hopeful the carpenter could find what I needed.

An hour or so later he returned with a handful of screws, all of them with slotted heads. "I am sorry, sir," he explained, "there are no stars, only minuses."

"Stars? Minuses?" I wondered for a moment what he meant. Then I realized what he was saying. Stars are Philips head screws in the vernacular of one who had never, not once in his life, ever seen one. The Philips design looks just like little stars, millions of which light up the African night. Minuses are, of course, slot head screws. In Ugandan vernacular, a screw is a screw is a screw. They all have slotted heads so there is no need to distinguish between head designs. There is only one head design - a minus. Need a slotted head screw, just ask for a screw.

Now, I have found one tiny little shop at the end of a street lined with hardware shops that sells nothing but screws. It is owned and operated by an older Muslim gentleman who is always helpful. In his stock of thousands of regular screws, he has a couple of small bins, maybe 6 inches square, with Philips head ones. But his shop is new and not well-known yet. Not even our local agent here knew of it. I happened across it one day as I was determined to discover what resources are at my disposal and was walking the streets of the city looking things over.

Well, back to the staircase. I also am addicted to power tools even though power is often absent. I bought an Italian-made electric drill to assist in the construction of the staircase. The carpenter had never seen one, didn't even know such things existed. He drilled holes in wood with a brace and bit using auger bits, the kind quite common a hundred years ago in the US. Other carpenters who make furniture in quantity do something different.

One unique characteristic of Ugandan business is that it is very common for like business to be located side-by-side on the same street. There will be an entire street filled with hardware shops, or plumbing supply shops, or office supplies or ... One street we frequent offers "factory" made furniture, factory being the rather ambitious label for craftsmen's small shops. We were in the market for some ordinary wooden chest-of-drawers, like the kind you would find in an unfinished furniture store in the States. On the street where these are made, in business after business, they all hire young men to drill holes in the drawer fronts and install knobs on the drawers. No drills here! Not even braces and bits. No, the young men squat on the ground with a bent nail and twist it back and forth drilling a screw hole for the knob. A bent nail!

In my last post I wrote about living close to the land here and using resources at hand. I would like to teach radio to some of the kids who live here at the project. I brought with me a handful of diodes (I know we could use razor blades and there are plenty of them here, but I had the diodes and they took up no real space to bring them along) and a sack full of high impedance ear phones. I've been saving cardboard toilet paper rolls (I actually had more than enough saved up but the young man who helps with the cleaning threw them out. It was logical in his thinking. After all, why would anyone want to keep a bagful of cardboard TP rolls?) We have a couple of dead computer monitors (voltage spikes are lethal) from which I can cannibalize the degaussing coil for enameled wire to make coils. The rest of the stuff we need to make foxhole radios we can scrounge for - wire to connect the parts and make the tuning mechanism, a board for the chassis, screws (most likely minuses not stars), and lengths of wire for antennas. It gets us started and provides a platform to begin to teach radio theory.

We'll get the boards ready (gives new meaning to "breadboard" construction doesn't it?) and prepare by pre-drilling the screw holes for mounting the components. Wait a minute! The power is off again. Now, where did I put that bent nail?