I Love Our Receipts (wow...go me...third blog entry for November)

We just had two experiences where I was shocked by the price tag, and very pleased, to say the least.  The first was our electricity bill.  We share it with the house next to us (it’s not exactly a house...the living space is shared by three families – there’s a strip of rooms, a common cooking area outside, and a shared toilet and bath down at the end of the strip).  Terry told me that the combined bill was 200 cedis.  I started to freak out, but then he laughed and went on to say that it was only 17 cedis.  That means that our portion of the bill is about 3 cedis (with the exchange rate right now, that’s about $1.50)!  Can you imagine if that was your electricity bill?!

Yesterday, we went to get our brakes fixed because they’ve been squeaking for quite some time now.  I learned the hard way that squeaking brakes should be fixed sooner than later.  As the mechanic, who charged me over $700, explained to me, when your brakes are squeaking, it means your brake pads need to be changed.  If you wait too long, the brake pads get completely worn through, which means that you end up with metal grinding against metal.  When this happens, you have to replace those parts as well.  And that’s, supposedly, why he had to charge me so much.  Now, I know nothing about cars, so don’t take this as doctrine.  This is just what I understood from what the mechanic explained to me.  Anyway, I knew we wouldn’t be paying that much, but I was still concerned that the quote would be over our car maintenance budget.  

Now, I think I should explain, before I go on, what the fitting shops are like here (that’s what they call the auto shops).  When I first got here, I thought they were junk yards.  They are open spaces of dirt, with a bunch of broken down cars strewn across the lots.  There’s usually a small wooden/corrugated metal shack somewhere on the property.  And then there are one or two men working on cars, and a handful of men sitting or standing around, usually in a shady spot.  

So back to the story.  The first guy we went to said it would be between 20 and 40 Ghana cedis.  I hid my excitement, but when Terry and I consulted on the side, I told him I thought it was a good price.  He said he didn’t like the way the guys were smiling…haha…so he wanted to check another place.  You see, we’re SO used to prices being jacked up because they see my color.  At the second place, they needed 1 cedi to go pick up the, ummm, I guess the brake pads.  The pads were 6 cedis.  And that’s all they charged!  7 cedis!!!!  (Okay, Terry knew the guys, so they didn’t charge labor, but he said they would’ve only charged 4 or 5 cedis)