The House

Like I said in a previous post, searching for houses in Tanzania is not the same as searching for houses in the States.  But, after a week of driving all over Geita, we found a house that actually fit our criteria, or at least most of it.  It is 1) within 1 mile of the central market and town, so I can walk easily; 2) is super cheap; and 3) has an indoor kitchen!  I'm very excited about number 3. The house is larger than we were wanting, but there is just not a lot available in Geita, so you take what you can get.  We found a few other houses that also fit what we were looking for, except they were even bigger.  One house that our friends looked at had 11 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms.  I'm thinking it was originally meant to be a guest house.  Anyway, ours does not have that many rooms.  But we do have 2 guest rooms, so Karibu! (karibu means welcome, which is probably the most common word used in Swahili) We also found a few houses that were smaller, but they either did not have indoor kitchens or were more expensive to rent.  

Our landlord is giving is such a good price because he believes God sent us to him so that he could help us out and in turn, we could help the community. He's also a very wealthy man, so money's not so much an issue with him.  

So here's our house:

As you can probably tell, the house is not quite finished.  Or not at all finished.  People here often begin building a house and don't finish it until they find a renter.  Otherwise, squatters will move in, not take care of the house, and bring down the value.  So, while our house had walls and a roof, it didn't have much else.  When you rent a house in Tanzania, you pay between 1 and 3 years rent up front (security for the landlord).  And if the house is not finished, that money goes towards finishing the house.  We are paying 3 years rent to finish the house, and while we don't particularly like the money part, it does mean we get some say in how the house will be finished.  For example, I don't have to have royal blue tinted windows or tile covering every square inch of the house (including the front porch and walls-very popular here-to show wealth).  

Brett has been spending the last several weeks supervising and helping with the work being done on the house.  It's a stressful job, and I'm glad I'm not the one who has to do it.  But he's been able to build relationships while doing this, and two families have requested Bible studies as a result of this work.  Praise God!

We're hoping to move in to the house when we come back from Dar Es Salaam after Baylor is born.  It should be finished before then, but we don't know for sure.   And I don't know if our watch puppy will be up to guarding the house and its contents all on his own before then. I'll post more pictures as we get more work done.  I think today we're getting a toilet.