People, mostly foreigners, carried broken household items into the social hall of the First Parish church in Framingham. A man comes with a torn backpack. Another is holding an iPad that refuses to turn on. A woman hauls a bicycle and gardening tools from her car. The lobby is filled with lamps, coffee makers and sewing machines.
They’re here for the Repair Cafe, where volunteers from the community try to fix anything that comes through the door—for free. The goal: to reduce what gets buried in landfills and keep people using what they already have.
“Our society is all driven to extract more things from the earth, turn them into products and then send them to landfill as quickly as possible,” said Alex Volfson, one of the organizers.
“That doesn’t seem like a very good plan—if you think about us living on a finite ball called Earth — because in the end you will run out of things to dig up and places to dump them.”
Inside the hall, about 30 volunteers wait at portable tables, behind sewing machines, grinders, soldering guns and tool boxes stocked with parts and supplies.
Leslie White Harvey was the first customer in the long line outside. He headed straight to the watch repair desk with the rhinestone-studded watch he’d bought at a yard sale for a dollar.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” he asked. “I have a sports watch, but sometimes I like to dress up.”
Foss Tighe volunteers specialize in battery replacement. If the new battery doesn’t revive White Harvey’s gem, it will be switched to someone else. Tighe opened the back of his watch, took out the old battery and replaced it with one from his toolbox. The glittering watch started ticking.
This was Tighe’s fourth Repair Cafe, so he knew which batteries he would most likely need. He ordered them in bulk for about 50 cents each.
“Now for a dollar you have a really nice running watch,” Tighe told White Harvey. “Oh, and another 50 cents for the battery.”
That’s good.
“Of course,” said White Harvey with a grin, “it’s fantastic.”
Amsterdam hosted the first Repair Café in 2010; it has since grown to more than 2,600 worldwide. International organizers estimate they remove around half a million articles from landfills worldwide each year.
“On a global scale, that’s very little,” says Martine Postma, founder and director of the Repair Cafe International Foundation. “I’m not satisfied at all.”
But Postma says repair cafes bring many other benefits. They help guests see how they can live on less, save money, rely on neighbors for help, and slow down. Fixit Clinics, another grassroots improvement movement, shares some of the same goals.
After a hiatus during COVID, the Framingham group is aiming for three cafes this year. Organizer Marybeth Croci, with the Rotary Club of Framingham, said she had no trouble finding people willing to spend a Saturday afternoon fixing things for strangers.
“Our volunteers love it,” Croci said as a little woman came in with a sewing machine, hoping to get on the sewing repair table. “Could you guys make room? Toby is so tiny,” Croci asked with a laugh.
There is a wide range of skills here from knitters to electricians to software engineers and mechanics. It’s difficult to predict what services will be in demand.
“We hope for the best,” said Croci. “We get a lot of people who are experts in all fields.” Volunteers often collaborate on more challenging repairs.
Celine Riard, an interior designer, focuses on a common item in the Repair Cafe: lights. Riard picked up a magnificent brass model, opened the top, and stuck his finger inside.
“That little button,” he said as he tugged on the cable, “is usually the first thing that gives up.”
In less than five minutes, Riard was testing a new switch.
“Yes, it works. Done,” he announced. “Helping people, fixing things, you know, it really gives you purpose.”
The owner of the lamp, June Joyce, is a volunteer on the jewelery repair desk. Allexe Law brought Joyce a necklace made by Law’s great-aunt. The chain was too delicate and kept breaking. The necklace has been around for about 20 years.
Joyce threaded the beads onto a sturdier chain. Together, Joyce and Law decided to turn a piece of the sentimental chain into an anklet.
“It’s creative, it’s recycled,” says Joyce. “Not in vain, like it or not,” added Law ending his sentence.
Little is wasted in this room. A scrap of black cloth was just what Alison Quackenbush needed to fix the strap that was attached with several threads to Don Gage’s backpack.
“Sometimes it gets heavy stuff in there,” Gage said with a shrug. “When I would go hiking, I would add 20 pounds of weight, just to make it a little heavier.”
“OK,” laughed Quackenbush, “so I better do a good job.”
The repair took a little longer than expected. The needle on the Quackenbush sewing machine broke. After about 15 minutes, Quackenbush found Gage in the crowd and showed him the updated leashes.
“Succeed!” he says. Yes, Quackenbush told Gage, but he wasn’t sure how long it would last if he carried the weight all the time.
To the manager of Repair Cafe, Volfson, this interaction has helped Framingham become a stronger and more independent community.
“If we can fix it ourselves, that’s local resistance right?” he says. “Addiction sets in, I go to the big box store for everything I need.”
There is a climate benefit, however small, for every improvement. The new backpack or the toaster oven or the sweater you bought after you threw away the old one “is coming in by truck, that is coming by ship, that is coming from another country. One of them uses more fossil fuels than the other,” said Volfson, who helps lead local volunteer group Transition Framingham.
Not everything put in front of volunteers today can be repaired on the spot – or at all: jackets with unusual zippers, VCRs and coffee percolators baffle the experts. A volunteer agrees to keep working on a 1920s-era sewing machine, if he can find the parts. And 10-year-old Abdul Senusi wouldn’t be able to ride a black and orange BMX bike home. Need a new chain.
But Senusi, whose mother persuaded her to come, was captivated by all the action at the repair table.
“I thought it was just about the bikes,” he says, “but it turns out there are all these things. So I was like, this place is actually cool.
Senusi’s mother, Safiyat Hamiss, stands by the sharpening table with half a dozen gardening tools. Her small business, Tasty Harvest, helps people start small gardens.
“I’m ready for the season,” Hamiss said with a laugh.
By 5pm, by the time the cafe finished, 80% of the more than 100 damaged items had been repaired. Volunteers pack and store portable desks, except for one. Jim Rutherford and Brenda O’Malley kept one of the computer repair stations open until six o’clock, when the file transfer from the old computer to the new computer finally completed.
Source link
