Monday, February 6, 2012

How to build a house.

Once in a new village many displaced stay in a host family. When it's clear - after several weeks or even months - that the security situation does not improve at home, they often build their own houses. You want to know how? There we go:

1. Find long, thick tree branches;
2. With your machete make holes in the ground - often in the form of a circle or a rectangle;
3. Put the tree branches inside the holes and fill the holes;
4. Find long but thinner tree branches, and banana skin (not the leaf);
5. Create the wall-frame by connecting horizontally the thinner branches to the vertical thicker branches by making use of the banana skin;
6. In a similar way create the frame of the roof;
7. Now fill up the walls. Create something cement-y by mixing sand plus water plus clay plus small rocks;
8. Find straw (or banana leafs) to cover the roof-frame.

And done!

Building a house like this can take as little as several days. The picture below is one of these houses - built by a displaced family from Bunyakiri on a piece of land the village chief gave them for rent. As you can see, it's located on the very outskirts of the village.

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