Can you imagine buying a stove and paying for it little by little every day? That’s what my neighbour is doing only she’s purchased a new kompor. Kompors are little one burner units that use kerosene for fuel. They make a nasty smell and are smoky, but people can’t afford to pay out the 65,000 rupiahs it costs to fill an LPG tank and the 230,000 rups it costs to have a gas kompor. That’s just way too much money at one time. So the neighbours also can’t save up the 90,000 rups it costs to buy a new kerosene kompor so they bought one on credit. There’s a guy that comes around every single day and collects 1,000 rupiahs from them. So, because they bought on credit the stove is costing them about 120,000 rupiahs and it will take about three months before it is paid off. Apparently lots of the people around here are doing this. It is really hard for them to save up enough money to buy things like that outright. There’s always someone who gets sick and going to the doctor costs around 50,000 so any savings are quickly eaten up.
One thing that I won’t miss about living here in Bandung is the terrible ammonia smell that comes up our drainage pipes sometimes. It can be very overpowering. That’s because our sewage basically goes down the hill and into the river… yummy eh?

I saw these two girls the other day wearing their saturday school uniforms. All kids that go to school wear uniforms like this on Saturday. I think it is considered their red cross uniforms and they learn life skills on the day they wear them.