Everyday I'm Hustlin

This blog entry was inspired by the recent hustles that I have seen in and around Arusha. To me, a hustle is basically anything that you do to survive and pay the bills. It could be your regular 9-5 or a less conventional hustle such as selling bootleg dvds and cds or selling "hot" items out of the trunk of your car. In Atlanta, I am used to seeing certain hustles such as the dvd man coming into the beauty shop trying to sell the latest cds/dvds or the occasional person approaching you in the parking lot trying to sell anything from watches to perfumes. Arusha, though has led me to see hustling on a whole different level. Here people really get their hustle on and can be found selling anything from watch batteries to white baby dolls. The most creative hustle that I have seen so far though has been charging people to weigh themselves on scales set up on the side of the road. I guess in an area where not too many people have scales in their homes, making money off of people weighing themselves is not a bad idea. There is apparently a market for it b/c when I passed by I saw 4-5 people being weighed.

Another hustle I have discovered here is bootleg dvds. The dvds here are a little different from the dvds I would get in the States though. Here you can buy one dvd and it may have 13-15 movies on it. Not a bad deal! There is one catch, however. The movies are not always in the desired language. For example, I was all set to watch Madagascar 2 the other night until I discovered it was in Russian. The other 12 movies on the the dvd which included Shrek 1,2, and 3, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua, were all in English. Of course the one movie that I wanted to watch would be in another language. We tried to watch it with subtitles but the subtitles made no sense whatsoever. They were ridiculous and had me wondering whose job it was to translate.

Other hustles I have seen here are charging people for bags at the local markets. Not sure if this is Arusha's attempt to "go green" and encourage people to bring their own bags, nevertheless it is a hustle. Usually young boys are walking around the markets trying to sell plastic bags. I have also seen someone getting their nails painted at a little stand on the side of the road and carts full of used clothes for sale. Additionally, people have tried to sell me newspapers from various countries and mosquito zappers that look like tennis rackets. You are always approached with the sales pitch that this is a special "muzungu" (white person/foreigner) price that is 10 times higher than the price for locals. You learn quickly to negotiate the muzungu price and get it the item for less than half of the original asking price or walk away.

The locals though are not the only ones that have perfected this art of hustling. The muzungus that have been in Arusha for a while, have also benefited from this art form. They are making money off of catering to other muzungus. This includes opening grocery stores, movie theatres, restaurants, clinics and coffee shops that the average Tanzanian cannot afford. Here the minimum wage is about $41 per month. On that budget, not many people can afford to pay $10 for a meal, $8 for a movie or $3 for a cup of coffee.

I guess, in the end though, hustling just makes good business sense. That is what good business is all about: finding a market, catering to that market and making money off of it. They say, "You can't knock the hustle" and I'm not knocking it, it just seems that the various hustles create more of a divide in the levels of society and these societies interact mostly in a business/ employee/ employer relationship sort of way. These are just some personal observations that I have made so far that I am trying to understand more and find out more about. I will keep you posted.