Blessings and Bubbles: A village house in pictures

Let’s go on a guided tour of my village house.

In February there was a block of land and an idea.

On the empty land with Sampson, who is a literacy teacher, translator,
my neighbour, my village brother and the one who was in charge
of building my house.

I didn’t expect there to be a house on that land when I returned in April, but it was well under way.

Over the next five weeks, it was finished!

There were two big working bees involved. The first was the biri party, when about 40 women from Ubuo (my village) and Goiravi (a 15 minute walk away) came to stitch thatch for the roof from nipa palm leaves or to cook food for the workers. About 30 men and boys turned up to finish the roof frame and attach the thatch.

Expert biri stitchers

Novice biri stitcher, but the centre of attention for giving it a try.
I completed three lengths of biri

The team doing framing and putting the biri up.
They’ve already completed the far side of the house.

When the decision was made to dedicate my house on the coming Sunday, my house was far from complete.

Thursday, when the dedication is to be on Sunday.
No end walls,no internal wall, holes in the floor,
an open patch in the roof…!

Thankfully the next working bee was on the Friday, when a work team came from Kapuna hospital to install my toilets, wash place and rain water tanks. Due to technical difficulties, the tanks did not get done that day. The team arrived in the morning, offloaded their supplies and worked hard all day. Others from the community turned up and an amazing amount was achieved.

Cleaning up ready for the working bee to start

The Kapuna team turns up and offloads supplies…

…including the ark of the covenant?!
No, just a big, heavy box full of tools....

…including power tools, so they brought a generator too.

Later in the day, the end wall is finished,
the front stairs are in place and decorative
railings are being installed.

Inside, the Kapuna crew install
composting toilets and a wash place.

A lot more work happened on the Saturday, and on Sunday we really were ready to dedicate the new house. The land owner was the one who gave me the key to the front door and said that he gave the land to the Kope translation project.

Dedicating the house was quite the ceremony…

… and of course was finished with a feast.

Inside my house I have three bedrooms (who of you will be first to visit?), a store room, a bathroom, a kitchen space and my long open living area. There is also the translation verandah, which is my attempt to have some sort of work/private divide in the village. We’ll see how that goes!

Finished house looking towards the front door.
The sawn timber is all off cuts from the local timber mill

Finished house looking from another angle.
The low bit is my translation veranda.
The window up higher is my kitchen window.

My bedroom, which is basically a mattress on the floor
under my mosquito net plus a small amount of hanging storage

Standing in the front door looking at the living
space on the left and translation veranda on the right

The space that will become my kitchen once benches are installed. I’m organising a gas bottle through the hospital, so shall be cooking with gas on my two burner stove. Once my rainwater tanks go in, outside this window, I will have a tap in the kitchen and one in the bathroom. These will be high enough to put a bucket under, not high enough for a sink or a shower, but that is still indoor plumbing!

My bathroom, and yes, I have been saying toilets in the plural.
The twin toilets are part of a sanitation scheme being trialled by the hospital. Most Gulf toilets drop straight into the river, where the tide flushes them twice daily. This is the river people bathe in and eat the fish from.
It is hard to dig a septic toilet on land, as the whole area is a swamp and the ground is saturated. This means that the tide comes in and out in holes in the ground as well as in the river. Even places on higher ground get flooded by the occasional king tide.
The idea of this system is that the barrels (recycled from an oil drilling company) hold the waste away from the water. The solids remain in the barrel and slowly compost. The liquids escape through a pipe in the bottom into a pit beneath. I will use one toilet at a time. Once the first toilet is full, I will leave it to compost while filling the second toilet. Once the second toilet is full, the first one should be done composting, and can be emptied onto the garden for the process to begin again.
At the moment this is still in the trial stage, but the hospital is hoping to get funding to widen the scheme to villages across the region.

Looking from my kitchen along the living area. Sampson is installing the door on the storeroom. You can just see my mossie net in the bedroom on the right. The camp chair on the floor is my one piece of furniture. As it is light and portable I take it almost everywhere with me. A little bit of cushioning and back support make a huge difference when sitting for hours on the floor of a church or in a dugout canoe.