AFZ                           The electrics  I found in Syria

In 1980 I went to Damascus with a small group of people from Plessey Radar.  The equipment I was responsible for was quite low-tech.  It was a comms system that the MoD had developed many years before, and I knew it in fair detail.  I also volunteered to go to a place that many people dread.  This essay is a bit about electrical matters and a bit about the society I found there.

I'll start off by saying that Damascus is a far safer city for a stranger to walk around than any European city.  The chances of getting mugged are so close to zero that you need a study of infinitesimals to appreciate the difference .  Or at least that was the situation in 1980, and I personally doubt that it is much different now.  I have written a short book on my time in Syria and if anyone wants a copy, I will send it as an email attachment, or snail-mail a copy to a given address.  If I get a lot of requests, I might start asking for printing and mailing costs, but I would like to publicise my findings on the Arab world to to put a lot of people straight.  The Arabs are a charming people, but they do think differently to us.  Business is a very uncertain area  --  leave it to the professionals.

I got friendly with a French engineer while I was out there.  He took me to the site where he was working, to show me the sort of equipment he worked on.  He spoke good English having learnt it from a BBC course.  The large substation that he wouldn't take me into, had a number of cubicles outside with switch and transformers equipment in them.  He opened one of the doors to let me see inside.  The switchgear was modern and looked good.  But the rubbish on the floor made the place look a tip.  I commented on the mess and he shrugged his shoulders in typical Gallic fashion and said "This is Syria".  I understood exactly what he meant by what I had found in other areas of that society.

In the flat I rented in an up-market part of Damascus (Mahajerine), the background was almost European provided you stayed in the building.  The floor of the block was rented by the mother of a cardiologist who had trained in the USA and married an American nurse.  The doctor (Sammi Kabani) lived on the ground floor with his family, and I became quite friendly with him and his wife Sally   Sammi was born an Arab but lived as a European.

I took the ceiling rose of the kitchen pendant down to replace a damaged flex., and I investigated the wiring behind it.  I didn't have a test-lamp so I used an Avo 8 and was startled to find 400 volts there.  I very carefully put everything back as I found it and only interfered with the two terminals that had the flex connected.

There was another frightening aspect of the Damascus electrics.  Syria used to be a French colony and the French were the technical authority,  Very similar to places like Cyprus and Malta where everything you find there is British.  But I hope that mainland France has progressed beyond what I found in Syria.  The apartments in these blocks of flats were built so that the family could have a maid.  A flight of steps led up from the kitchen into what could only be described as a high-level dungeon.  The ceiling was about five foot six, and the toilet was a farsi-kharsi  --  i. e a hole in the floor.

In each living room and bedroom was a wall plate that had three devices on it.  A bell push to summon the maid, a two-pin French socket for a lamp or radio etc, another two-pin French socket to plug in the telephone.  You could differentiate between the phone socket and the one with mains on it by the silk-screening on the bakelite.  But silk-screening rubs off; at least it did in Damascus.  I didn't have a telephone, so there was never any risk of plugging it in the wrong hole.  I wonder what would happen!

But the Arabs are inventive and I saw a telephone mechanic at another apartment, tracing a single telephone pair out of a matt of wiring in the lobby.  He had wired two plugs back-to-back and put 220V on the telephone pair in the flat, and looked for the same pair in the ground-floor lobby by using a test lamp.

I don't think that Syria has a Health & Safety Executive.  I saw other hair-raising things that I recount in my book.

I did ask about a Highway Code as I drove the firm's car around the city quite a bit.  They had a copy in French and Arabic.  But English is widely spoken by the population.  Anyone under 40 speaks Arabic and English.  Anyone over 50 speaks Arabic and French.

Damascus was a fascinating place in 1400 (that's 1980 by our calendar)