I've moved!!

Well actually I finally found the place that I will call home for the next 1 1/2 months that I plan to stay in Dar es salaam. I live in the City Center near the "clock tower." Just in case anyone every spends any time in Dar es salaam in the near future:) My roommates are two pilots for Air Tanzanian, Sharad, a married father of one from Mauritius and a Spanish guy name Roberto, who I have yet to meet. We live in a 3 bedroom flat for $600 a month, or $200 each. The last place I was staying at was $400, plus cable, electricity and the maid. It was in Msasani, which is a pretty nice area, and I had the most gorgeous views of sunset over the bay, but I had to live a crazy Tanzanian woman.

I almost decided to live there until one night after she smoked herself out while reading the bible, she decided to tell me about Jesus Christ and how he saved her life. I polite told her that I do not like to discuss religion, and also I just really did not want to hear her personal problems. I mean seriously, I had only been there for 4 days, and I thought this is a little personal. However, what really got me was that she had been reflecting on why someone would steal a laptop from me (one of 2 foreigners on a 16 hour bus ride), and she decided that it was because I did not have God in my life and that if I embraced Jesus Christ bad things wouldn't happen to me. Let's just say that the next day I moved out of there and was glad to be out!

My new place is better in the sense that I have more space, privacy, and cheap eats around. Sharad, being the father of a young daughter, has definitely shown me around and made sure that I had what I needed in the flat. We haven't had running water for over 2 days now, and have had to take bucket showers, which isn't so bad except that you have to go to the corner store and buy 6 and 12 liter bottles of water and walk up to the 4th floor. However, I really enjoy living in a more local area where I have more interaction with locals than other foreigners. It really gives you a better sense of what life is like here.

As I said above, the rent is $600 a month (or $7200) for a flat, which got me thinking how could local people afford this rent. Just to give you a little background the average college educated person makes between $4500 - $6000 a year. An unskilled worker, such as our maid, makes 90,000 T Shillings or $60 per month, or about $720 per year, or $2 a day. You couldn't even buy a latte in America for $2. Even though I find this is true is most developing countries, including Vietnam and Ghana, it always surprises me. I am not sure why, but it does.

I spoke to my flatmate about this this morning. He said that all of the people in our building are not of African descent, but are Asian (Indian and Pakistan descent) and most own the local shops around our area because even an educated Tanzanian person with a family living on one income couldn't even afford the rent in our building.

Anyways, I hope to motivate myself to write more blogs, but I have not done much but read. I am waiting to see if I get another assignment from Kiva, and then hopefully my visitor (who hopefully will be securing his flight today) will come in September and I can freely travel around Africa.

Hope everyone is well!!