We Flew to a Customer's Village to See How He Uses the Truck

In March 2018, we sold a used Isuzu dump truck to Mohamed, a customer in Tanzania. In September 2019, he emailed us: the truck had been running for a year and a half and was doing great, and he invited us to see it in his village.

On October 28, I flew from Guangzhou to Dar es Salaam, spent a night at Joseph's place, and the next day took a six-hour bus ride to Mohamed's village, 40 kilometers west of Mwanza.

The last 20 kilometers into the village were dirt road, the truck weaving between potholes. Mohamed waited for me at the junction on his motorcycle. His first words when we met: the truck is in the field, tomorrow morning it hauls water, and you're coming with me.

What the Truck Does in the Village

I had assumed the truck just hauled dirt. Once I got there, I learned it played a much bigger role in the village.

At six in the morning, it hauls water. The village has no running water, so a tank was welded into the bed. It fetches water from a well five kilometers away: three tons a trip, four trips a day, serving more than three hundred villagers.

In the morning it hauls bricks. There is a small brick kiln at the edge of the village, and the fired bricks are hauled to a town seventeen kilometers away to sell. In the afternoon it hauls cassava and corn. In harvest season they add wooden planks on both sides of the bed to carry a third more.

Over a year and a half, this truck has run on everything: muddy roads in the rainy season, gravel roads in the dry season, and grassland with no road at all. The odometer shows 90,000 kilometers.

The next day I got up at five-thirty and rode along on a water run. The pump at the well is driven by a diesel engine, chugging away. Loading took twenty minutes. When we got back to the village, women were already lined up at the junction with buckets. The truck backed into the threshing ground, the hose was pulled, and the day began for three hundred people.

His Improvised Maintenance

Mohamed's maintenance methods half impressed me and half made me sweat.

The impressive part: he built a wooden ramp to lift the truck so he could get underneath. Every two weeks he checks the leaf-spring pins and the grease nipples on the driveshaft. He buys grease by the kilogram in town.

He also keeps a little maintenance notebook: when the oil was changed, how many hours the truck had run, entry by entry in neat handwriting. That notebook is more disciplined than many fleet logbooks I have seen.

The sweating part: he washes the air filter with diesel, lets it dry for half a day, and puts it back. He mixes two brands of engine oil, saying the colors look about the same. When the fan belt got loose, instead of adjusting the tensioner he cinched it up with wire.

I told him that washing the air filter in diesel ruins the filter paper, lets oil into the intake, and will kill the turbo sooner or later. He said he cannot buy a new filter in town; the nearest parts shop is in Mwanza, a full day there and back.

I remembered that sentence. It is not that he doesn't know better. It is that he cannot get the parts.

I opened his toolbox: three wrenches, one hammer, one pair of pliers, half a roll of wire, and a kitchen knife for cutting rubber hose. That is all, and that is what kept a truck alive for a year and a half.

Roads and Fuel

You cannot get proper diesel in the village. His fuel comes from a fuel peddler in town, and it is cloudy. I filled a small bottle and brought it back for a lab in China to test: the sulfur content was more than ten times over the limit.

Burning fuel like that cuts injector life in half. That is the root of his air filter and fuel line troubles.

The roads are an even more direct problem. It is seventeen kilometers from town to the village: forty minutes in the dry season, two hours in the rainy season. A truck shaking on roads like that for a year loosens more bolts than three years on the highway.

At night the village has no electricity. He runs a small generator set for the lights and TV at home, switched off at nine sharp. His house and the church are the only ones in the village with a generator.

The Four Things I Brought Back

I stayed two nights in the village. Before I left, Mohamed slaughtered a chicken, and more than twenty villagers gathered around the truck while I explained how to adjust belts and read the dipstick. His son translated sentence by sentence.

On the flight home I listed four things, and called a meeting as soon as I got back to the company on November 5.

One, redo the manual that ships with each machine. The old manual was written for repair shops; too many words. Make it picture-based, bilingual in Swahili and English, one action per page. On the air filter page, spell it out: if you cannot buy a new filter, do not wash it in oil; clean it dry, knock it out on the back side, vacuum it.

Two, add three items to the kit that ships with each truck: a spare fan belt, two air filters, and a bottle of injector cleaner. The cost is under 400 yuan, but for a village customer it is a lifesaver.

Three, write maintenance intervals in two tiers by road condition. One tier for highways, one for dirt roads; on dirt roads the oil change interval drops from 500 hours to 300.

Four, make parts sourcing clear. Which shop in Mwanza, under what name, roughly what price, printed on the last page of the manual. Joseph promised to help us keep that list updated.

Nobody objected to these four things at the meeting. The boss asked about cost. I said reprinting the manual is 20,000 yuan, each on-board kit is 400, and at two thousand machines a year that is 800,000 yuan. He approved it, then added: I should have gone to that village sooner.

The first batch of the new manual, two hundred copies, prints next month and ships with the machines. The person who writes a manual has to have been to that village and drunk the water from that well.

The morning I left, the truck made another water run. I stood on the threshing ground watching it drive off, mud caked layer upon layer on the rear, the license plate completely plastered over. Mohamed said the truck would work another ten years. I said I would guarantee parts supply for ten years.