First post. Let's talk money.

My first post is from exotic... Oudewater in the Netherlands. I'm still at my parents' place; it is 11am, I fly at 9pm from Schiphol. Let's see, my first post. Let's talk money.

I'm switching jobs: bye meager PhD salary, hello over 8,000 US$ per month for being a Congolese MP. And, of course, this does not yet include extra money for being part of committees, travel, etc.

In the Netherlands an MP gets around 7,000 euro (9,000 US$), but this country is also a tiny bit richer. People here earn on average around $40,500 per year; in the DRC this is around $330 (both are in PPP)!

And while the Netherlands is just a little bit smaller than the Congo (the first is green on the map below), the government does have a bit more to spend: yearly revenues and expenditures are around $400 billion. The DRC government, on the other hand, earns around 700 million and spends around 2 billion (numbers from the CIA World Factbook).

Ok, one more number: 760 million dollar. Anyone? The revenue of the movie Avatar after only 2 weeks; more than the yearly government budget of one of the world's largest countries. Fuck!