While the past two days have been very productive, something else has also started to really hit home. After learning more about the socioeconomics of people living comfortably in Tanzania such as the staff at the clinic, I have come to realize that the American lifestyle makes people inherently materialistic and lazy. Please let me explain.

            Dr. Frank, before he and his wife quit their jobs and sold all their possessions, lived wealthy lifestyles. As a doctor in private practice, his income was well into six figures, allowing him to indulge in collecting various toys and art. Here, they pledged to live off $1500 per month, which is enough to allow the two of them to live comfortably. Now, this is almost 50 times less than what they formerly spent per month, but they’re just as happy if not more so.

            Here’s the perspective part. Tanzanian doctors who have MDs and go through residency programs earn about $700-900 per month. Nurse practitioners earn about $500 per month, and nurses earn about $300 per month. These salaries are more than 100 times smaller than equivalent jobs in the US. Furthermore, these are the jobs that require quite a bit of education.

            Here in Tanzania, if you’re wealthy enough to own a house or a plot of land, you probably will hire an escari and housemaids. Escaris are usually tribal men who guard the house at night. They work from around 7pm to 7am, patrolling the premises with their spears and knives. Personally, the idea of staying awake and alert for 12 hours doing pretty much nothing seems absurdly mundane, which is why I have enormous respect for the escaris who do this for a living. Most of the escaris have no other skills, and any income they can generate for their nomadic tribes is significant. They work 12 hours shifts 7 days a week for 6 weeks at a time and then take a week off to go back to their families. Here’s the kicker: Currently, an escari’s salary is about $35 per month. Tanzania recently raised the minimum wage to $80 per month, but you can bet that only foreigners will actually pay that wage.

            Now, back when I took the D-Lab class at MIT, we spent a week living off $2 a day. That experience was difficult, but not altogether impossible with sufficient foresight and careful planning. One can only imagine how difficult it must be to not only live off $1 per day, but also kick back a portion of that salary back to one’s family.

            To put things into perspective, a doctor in American can make over $1000 a day, which is almost three years’ salary of an escari. Even an American who is working for minimum wage is making more in one hour than what an escari makes in a week. While the cost of living here is definitely less than what it costs in America, it’s still less than an order of magnitude less. In terms of the disparities in wages, we’re now talking about a couple of orders of magnitude. It’s just absolutely eye opening.

Yet what’s fascinating is that most Tanzanians think the American lifestyle of excess and consumerism is what happiness is all about.