Landlords and Renters

The last month has been a little bit of a roller coaster ride with our landlords.  August brings the end of a 2 yr contract on our apartment, so it was time to sign a new contract.  This is all fine and good, until the landlord calls and says she is raising the rent.....SIGNIFICANTLY.   And immediately tells us that there is someone else wanting to rent it at the new price so if we won't pay, someone's waiting in the wings.

As foreigners in a different culture, it is always so hard to know when you are getting played and when people are being honest with you.  Our culture says, "just shoot straight with me", "tell me you need more money because you can't pay your mortgage or the interest has gone up".  The culture here doesn't speak directly and you really aren't sure they aren't thinking "you have the money, you can pay more, so I am about to take advantage of you".  As Americans that feeling of being taken advantage of really makes us buck up and fight. We have found that most times here this culture will congratulate you for taking advantage of an opportunity to have the upper hand and fighting back and forth to the end.

As Believers, this situation can be a fine line to maneuver and come out still with your witness in tact.

After much thought we felt led to stay in this apartment, so the day of the contract signing arrived.  We prepared a new contract, with 2 requests of our own to counter the higher rent.  The first, we wanted a security gate on our back balcony and second, we wanted to move our office to our home meaning they would have to agree and give us a copy of their real estate contract, proving the house was theirs to rent.  Pretty fair, according to our local friends.

Our landlords have always been nice and good to us and we have had no problems since moving in and getting through the initial negotiation stage.  However, this day was different.  We anticipated about a 20 minute meeting in which we would sign papers and hand over 1 years worth of rent in cash.  Not so.  They had no problem agreeing to put up a security gate. Done. They had no problem allowing us to register this house as our office.  They did have a problem with us living here for another 2 years and giving us a copy of their real estate contract. So for 2 hours they procrastinated and stalled and picked at little things but wouldn't budge.  We were dumbfounded. It was a very tense 2 hours.

It came down to the fact that one of our landlords daughters may or may not move to our town for High School in another year.  If she does our landlord thinks our house is very comfortable and would like to have a place to come spend a weekend every once in a while, if her daughter does come to school here. However, their family owns multiple houses in this town and she could go to any one of those for the weekend.  But she likes ours. Finally her brother signed the 2 yr contract saying she could stay anywhere, which made her very mad at him and us. When he signed it he also agreed to the copy of the real estate contract. This made her mad times 2.

This event happened 3 weeks ago.  The importance of the real estate contract has to do with us renewing our visas, now expiring in 2 weeks.  And it wasn't until yesterday when Rob had to drive an hour away to confront them with threats of legal action (yikes) that they handed the copy of the contract over to us.  It has been a long 3 weeks of phone calls, giving us the wrong paperwork and acting like they didn't know what we or any of our local friends were talking about, and refusing to give us what they promised.  We were down to our last efforts yesterday, when suddenly they produced it without having to threaten, coerce or anything else.  We truly believe that through much prayer, Father changed their hearts and just at the right time!

The whole ordeal ended yesterday with kind words and maintaining a good relationship in the end.  Phew!