Eyes to See, Ears to Hear

On Friday afternoon, we caught a ride with some friends who were driving the 12-hour journey from Dar es Salaam to Mbeya, our future home. We stayed with them until today with the main goal of the trip being to look at one housing option. The house is in Ifisi, a town 30 minutes to the other side of Mbeya. It is very beautiful but also disconnected because of the distance. Also, the layout of the house has the bathroom, kitchen, 4th guest bedroom, & a storage room on the opposite side of a 15-ft wide courtyard. Big turnoff.

We heard earlier in the week that there may be another house available actual in Mbeya the town and even better, only 15 minutes away on foot from the SIL office where I’ll work. Well, we went to look at it late Saturday afternoon and loved it. The rent is higher than the one outside of town but after other expenses like fuel, wear and tear, etc. they nearly leveled out. So, which one did we like more? The one in town by far. I took lots of pictures to show it to you but they are doing a lot of renovations to it at the moment so it is not as pretty as it will be when we’re there.

We visited the landlord (a New Zealand-er) this morning to walk through it one more time before making our decision. We verbally committed to the house and he e-mailed us the lease agreement this afternoon. The housing challenge is now settled. We have somewhere to call home.

More details to come…

Oh yeah, two other great things about today:

1- Dana made the 4-hour bus ride home without vomiting… always a plus…

2- A friend helped me figure out settings on my phone to use it as a wireless modem to access the internet and e-mail (EXTREMELY slowly, of course).  I am blogging from our banda!