When we’ve finished moaning about rats, lack of water, the heat, all manner of discomforts we suffer, let me share with you some perspective by illustrating what I think many, many Tanzanians live on. An average wage – a difficult thing to assess here as the difference between rich and poor is so huge – is about 10,000 shillings a day. If I list some prices of everyday items you might see what that means:
Rice (1 kg) 1200
Tomatoes (1kg) 1500
Water (10 litres) 3500
Bajaji (small taxi) 2000 (2 miles)
Bottle of cold beer 2000
Rice and fish in restaurant 3000
Chipsy mayai 1500
Meal in posh hot 10,000
Bottle of soda 500
Bananas (each) 100
Tea bags (50) 2000
Bus to Dar-es-Salaam 20,000
It is possible to live, but you will rarely eat other than at home, rarely drink beer, hardly ever take a taxi, drink tap water not mineral water, and travel out of town only if you have to.
If 10,000 shillings a day is a good wage and £100 a day is a good wage in UK, then you should be able to make the comparison and see what I mean when I say that THINGS are dear here. It means that 1000 shillings is about £10.00. It means a bottle of soda is the equivalent of £5.00. But time is cheap. I could have a housemaid for as little as 1000 shillings a day.
Enterprise is plentiful however. Tonight on a dark and dusty unmade track speeding over the bumps and humps in our bajaji, we came to an abrupt halt, the bajaji lifeless. Dogs were howling, we weren’t sure exactly where we were and I thought, “Crikey. This could be a bit scary.”
Not a bit of it. Our dereva jumped out, opened up the engine, removed the pipes from the fuel pump (petrol spewing out over hot pipes at this point) sucked and blew all the muck out of the fuel pipes with the help of the light from his mobile phone, put the whole thing back together and had us back on the road in about three minutes. Impressive or what!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.