Haggling Hassles

Leading up to a visit by another MCC couple who will conduct a training on drip irrigation kits (www.chapinlivingwaters.org/), I have been doing a lot of digging in our garden. To help enrich this newly dug soil, I need manure and lots of it. Fortunately, one benefit of living in a pastoralist community is that manure is easy to find. Steph went to our neighbor's house and asked if they could provide us with some manure, 30 wheelbarrows worth.
The first snag came up as our neighbor came by with the first load of manure (which she carried in a bag on her bag). We were thinking of manure in wheelbarrows while she was thinking of it in bags. So we decided one bag was about 1.5 wheelbarrows and then haggled over a price. Another friend was at our house at the time and helped translate since we've never mastered bartering in Maa. We agreed on a price of 60 shillings a bag. Just to compare that to dollars, its about 75 cents, given a normal wage for manual labor at less than $4 a day. We figured 20 loads would take about 2 days worth of labor so we'd be paying her at almost twice the going rate.
The next day the woman's co-wife (wife of the same husband) came to our house with bags of manure. This woman argued that the price we agreed upon was not fair and made us renegotiate the price to Ksh 85 per bag, since the bags carried close to 2 wheelbarrows of manure. As the manure came in via both wives, we saw an alarming trend. The second wife was bringing in very small bags (and tended to complain about them) while the other continued bringing big ones. After a few days we had all the manure we'd need and decided it was time to settle up.
We brought the women over to the manure pile and measured out the manure. It was 26 wheelbarrows worth, carried in 18 bags (so closer to the original 1.5 per bag we estimated). Given that, we said that we were willing to pay the original Ksh 60 per bag that we agreed upon. We paid them each and they went home. They did not seem happy.
The next day they came back demanding more money, 85 per bag. Now came the language issues. One interesting thing about haggling here is that the numbers people use are Swahili numbers. We don't know most of the Swahili numbers so we had a hard time communicating. This is on top of the fact that we were trying to multiply out the bags and wheelbarrows by various prices (showing them that we were being reasonable) and they had no idea of what we were talking about since they had never been to school and didn't know how to write numbers, much less multiply them.
Finally we found somebody to translate and mediate. The women's story is that they never agreed to the Ksh 60 in the first place. I think the second co-wife just wanted more money and convinced the first one to go back on her word. The conversation got heated when they threatened to prevent us from ever getting manure again in Najile (I almost laughed at the thought) before finally we agreed to pay them the full price if they would bring the rest of the manure (4 wheelbarrows worth) we needed for free. They agreed and went on their way.
Such is life in a country of no set prices. Hopefully our haggling hassles will pay dividends when we get back home.