Hunting for a house

Our first goal is to find a new place to life. Preferably a place to life and to put the container to start making cheese. To get the container installed with electricity, water supply, drainage, a roof with the solar panels for electricity and hot water is quite a big investment and sets quite some demands to a house. Just being able to get there with a truck and being able to place the container is in most cases a challenge due to the hilly dirt roads. We are looking for rental places and places to buy. The easiest would be to rent a place in “Boma” the administrative centre of town, with colonial houses. Rent is between 300-400 euro a month. Most mzungu -white people- stay there. But our preference is to stay in a place more out of town, where we can grow our own vegetables and live in a more mixed environment.

I miss funda.nl, the internet site which is very clear in the availability of properties in the area. We have several contacts, some via reference, one real estate agent, some just people knocking on our door, who know we are looking for a house. At first we depending on boda-boda (moped), which make it quite difficult to travel, but since a week we have a car, so we now drive around town with normally 2-3 people in the back giving terrible directions to where we should be going.

We see on average 5 houses a day, most of them are not really suitable. To get a picture or idea of a house before we go to visit is quite difficult. Our demands on a house are very non-Ugandan. We prefer a veranda to overlook a garden, preferably with a view. A standard Uganda house has a veranda directed to the road side. Most of the life around a Ugandan house is around the backyard of the house. Which, if finished, has a wall around it with an outdoor kitchen and a number of small rooms, which are used as storage or staff rooms. Sometimes we are asked an inspection fee, sometimes a house turns out not to be for sale. The last 1,5 week we are exhausted when we go to bed, trying to match our ideas with the houses we have seen.