Just a quick trip to the grocery store....

Tuesday I went grocery shopping with Julia and Mrs. Joy. Now I've been grocery shopping here before so it wasn't really a new experience but I wanted to tell you about it because it really made me think. Just to see the difference. Just to see what it's like.

In the states I usually do the shopping for the family (on my week) on Tuesdays. There is this one nice grocery store about 15 minutes from my house that has everything I need on a usual basis. So I get around, hop in the car and drive to the grocery, park, shop, push the buggy of bags to the car, load 'em up and drive home. I put them away and continue with my day. The end. Oh, sometimes I have a nice little chat with the check out girl. Sometimes I see someone I know....but that's still it.

Here's what happened on a regular shopping in Tanzania. We get around, hop in the four wheel drive SUV, wait a second while Luke gets the gate, and drive 30 minutes into Arusha. We drive on a dirt road for part of it, an extremely rough and potholed paved road and into the city itself that is lined with other vehicles, push carts, people and animals. We stop at a roadside vegetable stand and bought 1-2 kilos each- carrots, zucchini, cabbage, tomatoes, potatoes. Two heads of lettuce, two large avocados, one large pineapple, two mangos and a bag of apples. Julia and I stood there in the dirt talking with the lady (Julia did the talking seeing as I can't speak Swahili!) as she got the vegetables ready with Julia keeping a tally. We paid about 18 US. for all of that. I know for a fact I couldn't have gotten away with that much, in that quality for under 45 US. in the States!!
Then we drove about 10 minutes further to a supermarket and bought some house ware type items (like doing your Walmart shopping) and fresh milk products like cheese, (10 US. for 1 kilo.) and yoghurt. This stop made up for the cheap price of produce with things like a toothbrush costing about 4 dollars US.
The last place we went to was a grocery store called Pick 'n Pay. There we found boxed milk, canned vegetables, condiments etc. These items were about average. So we check out and they actually have a scanner system (the shop I've been to in Moshi had a calculator) and the young man boxed up the groceries and carried the box out to the Wagon for us. We headed home by way of the post office through more traffic, speed humps, daladalas, people on foot pushing carts....
Thirty minutes of it. Back up the dirt road to the house, pause at the gate while Luke holds the dogs and opens it for us. As we're unloading everything Linz informs us that the power is still off so we put away the perishable food, and wait as long as we can before Luke starts up the generator. The end.

That was their regular shopping trip- Mrs. Joy and Julia were commenting on the ease of it. Which it was...if you live in Tanzania.

I'm amazed at the difference in so many ways. Just the whole way you go about things here! It's humbling and sobering to think about the two different ways of life.

And I thought that getting a call from Mom for one more thing as I was almost to the check out line was inconvenient!

Yep, that's an avocado!