We have to visit homes to do a kind of means test.
We visited a mother with children in a house plastered in cement and with a metal roof. The door was metal. The windows were small, to keep the heat out. The ground was the reddish brown mud and grainy quartz mix. There were chickens, and a cow in a shed. The yard was clean and swept, and she was happy and smiling because we had visited to see if she could be given some support. The children were shy and curious. Mzungu are not commonplace.
There was a mud hut in the traditional style, and some poles with ‘crook’ tops that could take a cross beam. These are ‘grown’, the crook being part of the pole, not a nailed on appendage. The cross beams, like rafters, would have been rested on these, and then lighter beams, like purlins laid across these with a mud and grass layer over this. Further south banana leaves are used to make up sheds, instead of mud. There is virtually no pitch to the roof other than that caused by a bit of misalignment. There are virtually no straight lines, as most of this work is done by eye and by sketching foundations out on the earth. For this building, the mud blocks would have been made on site and allowed to dry for a couple of weeks.
This kind of building is virtually redundant now, as blocks, a bit bigger than the ash blocks we use and quite a lot heavier, are brought in from one of the local factories.
The home was surrounded by maize, and with the rain that has been falling recently, it was big and green and starting to look like a good crop. She lived close by her relatives: parents and siblings, an extended family.
She may get some support this year, but next year she should be able to fend for herself.
When we had visited, we talked about it and rushed off, Tanzanian style, in Matthew’s Mitsubishi 4x4 that rattled and thumped back across the valley to Mvumi Makulu (in England that would be Greater Mvumi). The rain was hanging over the mountains, and we needed to hurry. The river bed made of rock and stone at Mvumi Makulu was dry.
It began to rain.
There are no street addresses, and the Ghanaian system of using phones and satellite fixing for homes hasn’t reached here yet.
Most people have a fair idea where most other people live. We stopped and we picked up a passenger who would be our address book. We drove under a tree and along a road which became a track and then became a path. We knew the rain was going to be heavy because everyone was running to find shelter. The rain increased in strength. Our passenger got out to enquire at a house. When he returned, he was soaked right through, and we had the wrong address.
We had been watching the flow of water down the track, and it was rising at about an inch a minute. We turned and drove back up the track that was becoming a river to the village centre with rain pouring through the leaks in the windscreen, and sheets of spray either side of the car. We dropped our soaked passenger outside a cafe. When we crossed the bridge, there was a lot of water, but not enough to deter people exploring the sand and rocks.
We drove on, and in twenty minutes were on a dry road. We didn’t get to see the mother who is a 47 year old widow with HIV and four children. It takes some getting used to.
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