Homeless in Dar

So, I'm in Dar, and homeless. Thankfully, so are Rebecca and Flora my two soon to be roommates should we ever find a place. We arrived in Dar at 10:30pm last Tuesday. Our first week has been quite eventful. We started our house search bright and early Wednesday morning, and have been searching ever since. We are extremely lucky because right now the three of us are staying a friend of Rebecca's, who is in Canada on leave. Rebecca is the other MEDA intern and has visited Tanzania before so she knows some swahili and her way around, which has been invaluable in our hunt.

Perhaps the best way to explain how one find's a house in Dar is to describe one of our many adventures. First of all, it doesn't matter if you go to a registered agent or a guy on the street, inevitably you end up as we did last night, in the back of a tiny hatchback with one legal agent, several illegal ones and a spare tire because your agent was in a car accident on the way over and needs to give the tire to some garage which will be fixing the other automobile. This ammounts to 6 or 7 people in a 4 person car with no seatbelts. Anyways then you get taken to several houses that are waaaay out of your price range, or not what asked for at all. The problem is, the ones that they say are in your price range turn out to be twice that when you talk to the landlord. Oh, and they only want to rent for one year, no less. We're here for six months, and it's unfurnished. This despite the fact that you have explicitly said over and over again that you need a furnished place for 6 months for x a month. It's all part of the experience, and you can't help but laugh because there's nothing else you can do, but we really need a house and fast. I've started dreaming about house hunting, and that's just not a good sign.

Dar is beautiful and dirty at the same time. They burn their garbage here, and the waste water channels are open troughs on the sides of the road, so it can smell. Everything is dusty, and the traffic is ridiculous. It is also on a giant bay of the Indian ocean, with blue water, white sand beaches and lush tropical trees and flowers. There is an electricity and water crisis right now, so keeping cool or storing groceries is hard, thankfully eating out is cheap and at the office lunch is delivered!

Work is great, the people are wonderful, the office is lovely, and my project is really interesting. I have been reading and summarizing reports for the last two days to help me get aquainted with the work. I'm really looking forward to next week when, in theory, I will be doing some site visits to see how things actually work in the field.