Building A House for Grandma

While walking through our village trying to check in on some kids who haven’t been going to tutoring, we stumbled across a house being built. I love this kind of stuff.

The new house. See all the buckets!

Building a house is very much part of culture here. Some houses are built out of block, but most in the villages are built of bamboo and a combination of mud, rock and for some, cement.

First the men dig a series of holes about 2 feet apart and 3 feet deep, then they put large sticks in these holes and pack the dirt back in. I always love finding a house with it’s holes dug but no sticks. It looks like connect the dots, and when you connect them you get a house floor plan!

Next they lay bamboo horizontally across the sticks and tie them into place with what I call tire rope (an old tire that has been cut into thin strips), wire or something else rope like.

A little game of peek-a-boo through the wall.
Notice the black on the left, that is the tire rope. On the left is also
one of the sticks that is inserted to the hole in the ground, then the tire rope
is used to attached two bamboo halves. 

The bamboo gets attached to both the inside an outside of the stick, creating a space for either mud or rocks. Next the roof beams go up and then the roof goes on.

Inside corner with roof support. If you look close, you can see in the corner they
used another type of "rope" not sure what this is. 

Once the roof is on, it’s the women’s turn to work. They gather huge piles of red dirt and bucket of water to make little bricks (more like balls) of mud that they place between the two pieces of bamboo.

More buckets, I just love all the different colors!

Latino and one of the granddaughters filling the wall.
Nice "brick" work Latino!

As we came across the house being built, there was a group of women working on the mud walls. What I love about this is it looks more like a party than a work day. Imagine four generations of females in your family gathering to get the job done, about 20 people. The oldest probably being 80 and the youngest, less than a month old, spending the day on her back in the shade.

The oldest women in the group holding the youngest.
Grandma is getting a new home!

Because we know one of the women working on the house, we are welcomed in and invited to look around. I am so impressed, this is the largest mud house I have ever been in! A typical mud house bed room is no more than 9’x9’ often even 7’x6’. These rooms were 10’x12’, I’m not sure why but this encourages me and makes me happy. I guess I’ve just seen so many houses and wondered, “How on earth does this entire family fit in here?”

We learned that the home would be for the oldest woman and most of the work was being done by her granddaughters. The granddaughters we talked to had come in from Pemba to help do the work, while the older ladies cared for the smallest babies.

I asked if they would like me to take a picture of their whole family. It was hilarious. They had never taken a group picture before, so Latino was trying to help them figure out how to stand close to each other. He showed them to put their arms around each other’s shoulders. I was messing with my camera and when I looked back up, one woman placed her hand on her sisters head, rather than on her shoulder. Then when Latino came behind me, he put his hand up in the air and was counting to 3 for me to take the picture. I don’t think he realized but he was counting in English. Before I could correct him, I noticed that all the ladies were putting their hands in the air, mimicking his hand in the air counting. It was classic...

The shade made it hard to get a full group picture, but I love
how intense these women look. 

Latino trying to show the ladies to stand closer together
and put their arms around each others shoulders.  

Hands in the air, counting down!

It brings a smile to my face thinking of some day down the road. If someone offers to take a group picture of them…  will they all put their hands up in the air?

The Ants Go Marching...

I woke to the barking of a dog behind our house, it was Athena. With a new guard only a few days in and Athena barking a lot more than usual, I asked Nunu to check it out. He got up and talked to the guard through the window... there were stray dogs walking past the house. 

Nunu gets back into bed but I'm awake and decide I might as well go to the bathroom. First, I go look at the dogs out the front window. They are running around the yard, which isn't exactly normal at 3am. But my eyes are diverted to the towel draped over our back up water bucket. It's covered in ants. That's weird, I'm looking at ants outside the house and I'm feeling like they are biting me!

Odd I head to the bathroom and start turning on lights. There are ants in the hall, and they are coming from the bathroom door. I open the door and the far corner is covered. I go back into our room, turn on the lights to get Nunu and noticed the wall by our bed has a couple hundred ants and there are a handful of them on our bug net?! This is so strange. 

I have some bug spray and so spray down the clusters and Nunu and I go outside to see what the heck is going on. First thing I notice is the ants are all over the porch (where the dogs sleep) and the dogs are acting really strange, running around, stopping chewing, getting up running from something, stopping chewing and repeat, all three of them.

One side of our house has a trail from left to right (30 feet) and the trail is12 inches wide the entire way, some section have even more! Nunu empties the bottle of bug spray, all the while we feel little bites on our feet. It's crazy.

We go back inside, as their isn't much else to do. We try to pick all the ants off the bug net and check to see if any have made it inside the bed. They have. We try to get them all and try to sleep. Ten minutes in and I've pulled one ant from my hair line at the nape of my neck and another from the elastic in my underwear!!! In addition to 3 or 4 more than I smash in my fingers. 

Dead ants on my side of the bed. 

The shower floor, post bug spray.

There is NO WAY I'm going back to sleep!

I stay in bed and read, until I see the sun coming up. Nunu is asleep, and I figure one of us should be sort of rested.

I went out to access the situation... 

The dark lines are trails of ants walking away from the house!

Dead ants that fell from the wall.

Bug gear... PJ's, rubber boots, headlamp and bug spray!

Ants on the towel over our water bucket. 

Close up!! Look at those pinchers!!

Dead ant that has it's pinchers stuck in my shoe.

I spend the next 2 hours boiling water and dumping it on all of the ants I can find. 

I later learn that we aren't the only ones being "attacked" others in our village have these ants too, just not as many. Our guard, Mr. B, tells me this is common, not the type of common that happens everyday but it happens. 

Some research online makes me think these are called bigheaded ants. Sounds like they could have come out because it's the dry season and it's been a really dry year. I also read something that they sort of overtake colonies of existing ants.

Day 2:

Each day, they would almost all disappear, only to come back out at dusk. We tried filling holes in with ash, but then they would just pop up from another spot. It was madness!

Crawling into a hole on the side of the house!

Nice find Athena, but wrong bug.

Day 3:

One little bugger got me, pinchers dug in, just like on the shoe!
It hurt!!

Two live ones stuck on my boots!

Day 5: 

I honestly went out and thought they were gone! Until I found this massive group of them that can only best be described as a web. I dumped boiling water on them and Mr. B, our guard, made some torches and we basically ended up burning a 10' section of the yard. 

While we were working the three pups basically kept their distance, but then Nike came over. As Mr. B was trying to sush her away, she thought he was trying to give her a belly rub. So poor Nike sat and then rolled over in one of the thinner paths. She them started whimpering and booty scooting around. I ran over and in a matter of seconds she had about 15 of them latched onto both her fur and skin. Of course at this point the other dogs think it's play time! And rush over to help!

All this to say, that the ants outside of the house wouldn't have been nearly as big of a deal if it wasn't for the dogs.

Part of the web. Piles of ants, connected by
trails of ants... yuck!

A lil of LIVE ants. There were at least 6 piles like this.

A couple more of the piles of ants!

We had a few days of no ants and then we had a few days of rain and since then, I haven't seen one since. So for now, we think they are gone.