Bread and cheese

Someone told me the other week that Lusaka is the eighth most expensive city in the world to live in. As with any statistic, it doesn’t matter particularly whether it is true, what matters is that it is believable. And this statistic is very easy to believe.

In Roma, the area of Lusaka where the school is, renting a house costs around $3000 per month. And Roma is not even the most expensive part of Lusaka; elsewhere places cost twice as much. While these houses are certainly not bad as walls and a roof go, they are nothing particularly special by European standards (well, the $6000 houses with swimming pools and tennis courts are quite nice, but the places around here that we can see by peering over walls do not look overly grand, far from it really).

Roma apparently accommodates a large number of diplomats, so the rent is being paid for by, well, you actually along with people like you all over the world. Teachers certainly cannot afford to live near the school (living in the school doesn’t really count); I know of one teacher who lives within walking distance, but I think it’s her husband’s job that pays the rent. I don’t know who lives in the more expensive places; people who build their walls too high to peer over.

Food doesn’t come cheap here either. In Bath, Rachel and I used to spend less than twenty-five pounds a week on our food shopping. One of the reasons we were able to spend so little was that we would fill our trolley with bright orange Sainsbury’s basics products. Over here the prices are not that different, unless you’re buying cheese (the choices are between paying a couple of pound for something that doesn’t even look like cheese or paying twice as much for something that does at least somewhat resemble cheddar in its appearance and taste), but there are no value products for those shopping on a budget. So while in the UK you can get value or basics or whatever you want to call it orange juice for less than fifty pence a litre, here you have no choice but to buy the branded stuff which costs nearly three times as much.

One does of course learn quite quickly what is cheap and what is not: bananas here are cheaper (and nicer), apples are not; all those green vegetables you can get in the UK that say ‘Product of Zambia’ are unsurprisingly cheaper, raisins are not; bread is cheaper, cereal (again, no Tesco or Sainsbury’s own available) is not. Even though we have learnt what we cannot really afford, there are some items we have little choice about buying regardless of price, like cereal, so our weekly shopping still usually costs in excess of forty pounds.

We tend not to buy meat or alcohol with any regularity. While cheap meat is available it looks of dubious quality and so we have reverted to the mainly vegetarian diet we enjoyed in Bath (pastas, soups, omelettes, stir-frys), though tuna appears quite often on the menu. Wine is especially expensive, around ten pounds a bottle, so we have a bottle of gin in our cupboard, which cost less than a Chardonnay or Cabernet Sauvignon and will no doubt last us a lot longer (this is, admittedly, in part due to the fact that we have not been able to find anywhere in Lusaka selling tonic water for the past two weeks).

And then there are cars. The cheapest cars you can get cost around $6000 and are of the small, Japanese variety that look like they might disintegrate if you stared at them a bit menacingly for a minute or two. To get a car that would allow you to escape from Lusaka, the roads rather quickly become less like roads and more like pot-holed stretches of concrete that might have once been roads a long time ago, is likely to cost you twice as much and be of the big, Japanese variety that would make you disintegrate if you were ever foolish enough to step out in front of one.

The school neglected to mention that cars are a little expensive in Zambia when they offered me the job. And the few car dealers there are in Lusaka cannot yet be found on the internet, so when I looked into buying a car before we left I didn’t really discover a great deal. We have little choice but to own a car though, not if we want to buy food or sometimes leave the grounds of the school anyway, so we are searching for something of the bigger, Japanese variety so that we might venture out into the great African interior. Then we shall have to find the money to pay for petrol…