The Wall

Fulan's don't really do the concession wall thing. Granted, unlike Zarma's or Hausa's, each family concession is separated from it's neighbor by several hundred feet of open field. So privacy is not such a huge concern for them. As the sole out of place American, however, it's nice to have walls around me that define my space from common space. It's also nice to have atleast somewhere I can go and not be on display as the token anasara.

So my villagers, at peace corps' request, built a "wall" around my house. Especially important is the latrine wall. My concession wall is mostly made of eucalyptus branches suported by verticaly placed branches. The leaves provide most of the opacity of the nearly 6 ft high wall. Despite some drooping due to high winds (which was fixed with some enormous logs being partially burried to support the wall) it has held up quite well. The same cannot be said my arguably more crucial latrine wall.

My latrine was constructed out of kaka, which is horizontal clusters of millet stalks tied to vertical branches burried in the ground. To add extra privacy (there were slight gaps between the clusters) dala mats (mats of woven grass) were tied to the inside of the wall. This was all perfectly acceptable...until rainy season.

High winds and torrential downpours caused parts of the wall to droop. At one point the wall that faced the outside of my concession (and thus separated me from the main water carrying foot path) was nearly horizontal and thus only came about waste high. Less than desirable for my bathing area. This was fixed time and again by burrying large logs and tying the kaka to them. It's worth pointing out that logs are not cheap for villagers. Wood is at a premium in this country and these were good solid beams that could have been used for building roofs on mud huts.

So anyway, the situation got pretty bad, though it was functional. My plan for a long time had been, after rainy season, to replace the wall with mud brick. That was back in Octoberish that I started having conversations with my maigari to get this task accomplished. I still don't really know the town and it's resources such that I know where to go about finding a mason and how much it will cost and all that. So I depend on my maigari to help me out with that. But there was, I suspect now, some miscommunication and stuff just never happened. I would talk to him and, atleast I think, he would almost always say something along the lines of he was still looking for a mason who was available or what have you.

Eventually I came back from the horse tourney and found that my latrine fence had been torn down and the outside wall replace by vertical kaka. That is millet stalks themselves burried vertically in the ground. The wall dividing the wash area from the latrine itself was not replaced, though when asked my maigari said they were going to replace it. This wall was ok, but not really great as after about chest height, the millet stalks have lots of gaps and so people walking past could at the very least see that I was there, if not more. That and the presence of only 3 walls on the wash area (there were really four but the fourth was on the other side of the latrine) left me feeling uncomfortably exposed when I was bathing. Though once cold season started this was no longer an issue as no one bathes during cold season.

Moving on, cows began systematically eating this fencing until it was no longer serviceable at all and if I sometimes had to opt not to use the bathroom at certain times do to the presence of people on the other side of the fence. Luckily at this time I didn't get sick and so pooping did remain more or less optional. Or atleast delayable. But the main point is that my pooping/bathing habits were on display for the town to see. Eventually I got fed up and finally my maigari and I go the mason who was building the cereal bank to come build me a wall. I had two sacks of cement and a handful of cement bricks scavenged from another building site. These were not enough clearly, and so the price of mud bricks to finish it was discussed as was the labor, and I agreed and so we planned to start the next day.

Never try and get an estimate from Nigeriens. While I was aware of the 13000ish CFA I was going to pay for the bricks and work, they did not tell me about the 3000 CFA for lunch that I was expected to provide for the workers, the extra 1000 for the day laborer that my maigari hired without asking me first, or the 3 additional sacks of cement we turned out to need for mortor at 5000 a piece. Nor the fact that the mud bricks were actually used old bricks and not at all worth the 20CFA a piece I was paying. But all of this was not brought up until I had a 2ft high latrine wall. And the mud mortor has to be mixed and left to sit for a day before it can be used. So it was not feasible to switch to that after the cement bricks were done.

So in the end I paid 40000CFA or roughly 80 bucks for a somewhat poorly built cement/mud wall. But it's about 5+ft high and completely opaque and feels nice and secure. So I chalk this one up to a learning experience. Atleast now people can't watch me poop.