A few days ago in Apac the power was out, so Moses plugged his MacBook Pro into a petrol powered generator. With a snap and a spark which left an acrid burned plastic odor, his power brick was suddenly non-functional. We did some research by phone and internet to discover that the only places where we might find a replacement are the capital cities of Kampala, Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam. Kampala was a six hour drive in the wrong direction, and we aren’t due in Nairobi for a few more days.

So yesterday, here in Mbale, I found a man named Uumar at the U&A Electrical and Electronics shop. He and his partner Abdul repair mobile phones, boom boxes, televisions and all sorts of other devices. Their small workshop is festooned with broken electronic equipment from which they scavange parts. Uumar examined the broken power brick and after I assured him that it was OK if he broke it while taking it apart, he got to work with a hacksaw blade and a screwdriver.

In the end he established that a capacitor and a few transistors had blown. He had to ask around town in various places before he could find replacement parts. But within about an hour and half he’d tracked down what we needed and soldered everything in place. We carefully tested the output with a voltage meter before he superglued the case back together. Then I plugged the repaired brick into the MacBook and the LED glowed green, and the computer was charging again.

All this cost 38,000 Ugandan shillings: less than 20 US dollars. More than half was for the parts he had to buy from other people in town. His labor fee was about five dollars. As my friend Gerry Lusk commented on Facebook, in the US it would be difficult to find anyone capable or willing to do the job. And if you did find such a person, the labor charge would probably exceed the $80 cost of replacing the unit.