Everyone predicted a tin shortage in Nepal, and now it’s here. Just last week, I got two bundles of tin for Uttam’s family in the morning and delivered it to them in the afternoon. Now we are ready to bring 53 bundles of tin to our two villages, Archalbot and Bharte, and we’ve been trying to get tin for five days. I have all kinds of random new phone numbers stored in my phone – in addition to all the people we’ve met in the communities where we working, I now have contacts for Tin Shop Dhumre, Tin Shop Lamjung, Tin Shop Udipur…

Last tuesday night at about 6pm, I finally found a hardware store, on reference from one of the guys we’ve gotten to know in Archalbot, that had the 50 bundles of 12ft. tin we needed.  They had a tractor and everything. We’ve been putting people off in our villages for about five days, so we confirmed our plans on the phone and got ready to go the next morning.

Dilmaya and I set out in a cab from Pokhara at 6am. On the way, we decided to provide $300 in cash relief to Bal Kumari to help her repay her loans, because I shared a post about her on facebook and people offered to support her. So we had to find an ATM that would work in Dhumre. Two of them wouldn’t take my card, and finally Dilmaya was able to withdraw $300 and I shoved it in my bag and we were off again.

We arrived at the tin shop in Udipur, just north of Bote Orar before you get to Besishahar, and things started to get crazy. First, our cab driver demanded more than the fare he’d agreed to. Then, the tractor driver seemed like he was never going to show up. But things got really funky when the shop owner suddenly informed us that the tin would be $10 cheaper per bundle than she’d promised me on the phone the night before. In rupee terms, that’s an extra 53,000 rupees – enough to cover ten entire houses according to her original price.

I normally keep my southasian cool pretty well, but I was enraged. This is exactly what the government said wouldn’t happen when others said it would happen. And our hands were totally tied: we had fifty families who had built homes and, after we’d told them to sit tight each day for a week, were waiting for us to show up with roofs because we’d totally promised this time it was for sure. Today.

There’s also the blinding fury of watching people casually do something awful, such as profit off of the plight of earthquake victims and manipulate social workers encumbered by a tin shortage.  Certain things will really light your fire, if you know what I mean.

Stuck between an major rock and a hard place, called our pal Pradeep, the head official of shelter relief for Lamjung district, to explain our plight. Among other things, he told us to check the weight of the tin. Turns out that even 26 guage tin comes in all different weights and thicknesses. When we went and looked, the tin was only 42kg…lightweight. It folded like tinfoil.  They were selling it at the price of medium weight tin which is 25% stronger.

Reluctantly, Dilmaya and I realized we had to give up our plans for the day and drive up to Besishahar, Lamjung headquarters. We’d spoken repeatedly with tin vendors there on the phone, but it was impossible to get any straight answers. We were going to have to sit down in person at a tin vendor and wait it out, even if it meant calling all of our contacts in their villages, again, and telling them, again, to trust us.  We were still coming.  Really.

Before we left Udipur, we walked up the street and took down the name and number of another tin vendor named Sagar. He seemed like an honest guy. In any case, we sure had learned all the right questions to ask, and we needed all hands on deck.  The way the tin situation is working is that vendors in this region, which is in central nepal along the edge of the earthquake’s epicenter in Gorkha, drive about 10 hours south to Chitwan to pick up tin near the border in India.  Then they drive it back up here.  Often, they can’t say for sure what kind of tin they’ll be returning with until they get there and see what’s in stock.  That’s what Sagar was up to later that day.   If you’re lucky, you can order ahead of time and there will be a delivery of exactly the thing you need, which is what we were trying to do.

So that’s how we found ourselves in this shop, Raja Enterprises, in Besishahar, where we sat for about three hours, watching the owner Rajesh make calls about tin. And at 5pm, when we’d finally secured and ordered the tin, and it wasn’t going to come for a week, we were ready to get in a bus back to pokhara, successful on one hand and defeated on the other.

Then my phone buzzed. It was Sagar from Udipur – the guy we met in the morning. He was driving to Chitwan to pick up tin and could get us the 50 bundles we needed by the day after tomorrow.

Reboot. Reschedule. We reordered the tin from Sagar. Plus some other items of a different size from Rajesh in the shop where we’d spent three hours. By now we knew our list of households, the size of their tin, the number of people in their homes and the areas of these villages they live in so well that we were referring to them by their first names. FIFTY OF THEM.

Dilmaya got a call from a friend and said wearily, “I’m ready to open a tin business.”

So this all meant that we were going to stay the night in Besishahar, and hang around tomorrow, because there was no point in going all the way back to Pokhara only to turn around again tomorrow night.

It was late evening and we were absolutely wiped out. On the way home, we passed a steel-working shop, and suddenly I had an inspiration.  After all, we had a day to kill in Besishahar, and this place looked like a Willy Wonka Dreamland of junk turned wonder.

I went in and described my imaginary safe-box. “Is this something you could make?” I asked.

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A Willy Wonka Dreamland of Junk Turned Wonder