House-hunting in Congo

I’ve never had to house-hunt before; my options for lodging have always been pretty straightforward. Not so now that I’m married! Espérance and I have been renting the annex at another mission’s compound and this has been an excellent transition point for us, but ultimately we’d like to find a house and actually set up a home of our own. Thus has commenced my very first house-hunting experience.

In spite of my lack of experience, I have a sneaking suspicion that this process works slightly differently here in Brazzaville than it would back in Salem, OR. First of all, unless the house you’re looking at is in the forest, in the US you would never question the owner about whether or not his house has running water and if the electricity comes regularly! I’m currently evaluating whether running water is a non-negotiable for me or not…

Second of all, the process of actually locating a house that is available is quite different. If you want, you can hire an agent to take you around and show you houses. But you have to pay them for this each time and there might be 5 other agents showing 20 other people the same house. If you’re lucky enough to know someone in the business, you can just pay their transport and only give them money when you actually get a place. Otherwise, you have to just get a hold of inside information about when a house is becoming available. But you better act fast or someone else will snatch it up before you.

We’ve taken the semi-passive route of waiting for the information to come to us. So as of today we have seen a total of 2 houses in the past few months. The one we saw today is posing me a decision-making problem.

Pro: the floor plan is good for us, spacious rooms, 3 bedrooms
Con: it needs a lot of work to fix everything that is broken, missing, or dirty
Pro: most of what needs to be done we can pay them to do and they’ll take it out of our rent
Con: the location is not super close to where I work, adding at least 20 minutes each way to my commute
Pro: the location isn’t as far away from my work as a lot of other places in town and it’s close to the market where I shop and on a good bus line
Con: the water only comes out of the tap at night and never comes into the kitchen
Pro: I’m already accustomed to taking bucket baths and there are several options for rigging systems to make the water more convenient
Con: investing in fixing up and making a place home when you’re just a renter and will leave it all behind eventually is kind of a drag
Pro: it’s got plenty of space for the kiddos, so we could end up staying there for a number of years without needing to see something else
Con: What if there’s something better?
Pro: What if we don’t find something better and I regret not taking this place?
What do you think?

This is where I would park my car

This is the front gate

This is the spacious living/dining room

This is the stinky bathroom that they desperately need to clean. The shower is ridiculously tiny, but otherwise it's nice with all the tiling.

This is the master bedroom. Walls are being repainted white.

There are also two smaller bedrooms

Here's the front yard

This is the kitchen. I would need to use our wedding funds to purchase our fridge and stove and everything