renting a place

What do you do, when you want to live in another society, when you don't just want to pass through, seeing the hotel rooms or camping spaces, but actually plan to stay for longer? How does it function in Pakistan to rent a room? What kind of papers do you need for it and how do you find out about your different options?

After struggling in Berlin to rent a flat, I was prepared to look for internet-annonces, present various identity-proofs and go through personal interviews. But Berlin isn't Islamabad.

How do the people live here? What's an average rent? How do students live? Do they share flats as european students do and party all weekend long in their own space?

First of all: most students that come from further away live in hostels, that are either on the university campus or nearby. The hostels are segregated by gender and boys don't have access to the girl's hostel vice versa. Students who have their family or a relative in the city they study in, live with them.

As I didn't feel like moving into the girl's hostel, I decided to search for a pakistani family.

It is quite common for foreigners, who stay longer and who don't have the priviledge of coming together with an organisation that already provides them with a place, to stay as a paying guest with a family. As a single woman it is better viewed to live with a family and not to live alone. But how to find a reliable family that wants to house a girl from abroad that is studying in Pakistan for one semester?

You ask your pakistani friends.

Pakistan is a society, which is still greatly influenced by the treat of being a face-to-face society. Most of the things are being solved by knowing someone, who knows someone, who can help. Looking in the internet or in a newspaper for an appartment or a room is not seen as being safe. „How can you know that the family is a respectable one? They will charge you a higher price, when you go there as a foreigner than if I speak with them as a pakistani first!“ a friend of mine told me. Ok. I waited.

After two weeks and several researches by different friends, a family was found: my new pakistani family! Consisting of two woman (and a child and the people who help in their household), who are running an artschool in Rawalpindi.

I met them, they showed me the room, we drank tea together and I moved in three days later. No paper work, no financial security to be proven, just a good talk and trusting in the ones that have aquainted us and in the friendship that runs over two corners and extends to me, who is now part of a new family. My pakistani one.