Making do and mending

My mother-in-law is arriving on Sunday, and though it goes against the cliches, I'm actually looking forward to it. For a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is always nice to have her around (I have to say this, but I do mean it). Second, it helps my Serbian immensely, as we now speak this exclusively. And third, she is one of those people who is utterly handy to have around the house - cleaning parts of the house we forgot about years ago, and fixing things that typical Westerners would probably throw away rather than bother trying to repair.

In this day and age of environmental concerns verging on the hysterical, I think we in the west often forget some of the basic principles that our grandparents upheld: waste-not want not, make-do and mend. A lot of this is still alive and well in Serbia, but sadly, as westerinisation creeps in, it is being lost.

This is best illustrated, perhaps by example. Last year our aging digital camera went on the fritz and we then immediately began to consider getting a new one. It was only 3.5 megapixels and when one can get terrapixels with a widgeryflop extension and a billion squillabytes of storage, for just a few hundred Euros - why not? More to the point: it would be impossible to fix it here in Germany. Fixing electronics past their guarantee is hopeless as anybody who has tried to do so will testify. Usually one has to send the thing away for weeks or months, and then the whole process costs more than replacing it - what with the price of technical skills and so on. Anyway, this broken, obsolete camera sat unused and sad and broken and ready for the bin until my Mother-in-law said she would take it and get it repaired. Har har, I thought, how naive she was. In the end, we gave it to her.

I ate my words a few weeks later when I found myself shocked to see her using it. Apparently it was just a loose contact, and was fixed in Serbia in just a few minutes by some bloke in a shop. And what about all those cables that she didn't take (and indeed we couldn't find)? And the charger? Apparently this was all dealt with easily, and in any case, when it was full of pictures, she just had another shop print everything out for her, since pictures aren't pictures unless they're in your hand. The irony is that we, faced with a bewildering selection, and not really having time, haven't even replaced the camera, so we now get pictures from her.

I've had a lot of other experiences like this since in Serbia. I've had shoes fixed that I would have chucked out, and fixed well, for just a few Euros. I've had cashmere jumpers patched that I would have just replaced and used for rags. But sadly I think this is not going to last forever.

Anybody who has been visiting Serbia, or other countries in the region, over the past five years can't fail to see how much things are changing, and I think a lot of the changes mean the end for the kinds of things I've mentioned above. We in the west are so used to the use-and-throw-away philosophy that we readily impose it on the new members of our club, or at the very least encourage them to adopt it. So this means that these little fix-it shops and a rather large cottage industry that makes clothing and other things is disappearing. It is, afterall, hard to stay in business when a mega-giant multinational is offering to replace anything broken or worn-out for so cheap. And these things, unlike the coat that a neighbor made by hand, have logos on them, so they must be better.

I've also found it rather sad that this notion of quality in goods is seemingly disappearing as well. A few years ago there was a great clothing store in Serbia called Zekstra - indeed I still have two coats made by them. What impressed me was that they actually provided quality at reasonable price - not cheap, but acceptable - even if things weren't as trendy as they could have been. Last time I was in Novi Sad the shop had closed down. And apparently (see www.zekstra.com) it has now morphed into something else - seemingly unable to resist the onslaught from Zara and the Gap - it is now a part of MaxMara/Diesel. Young Serbs now want trendy, foreign disposable clothing instead of home-spun goods that last for years.

I don't know if there is a happy ending to this, and maybe this whole little rant is just a function of me getting older, but I was encouraged the other day to see, here in Germany, a fix-it shop run by some Turks in one of the Heidelberg suburbs. Apparently these kinds of things can come back if the need arises, and I hope that I can finally get that busted toaster fixed.