House Building Part 1: "Dutting"

Ever since I first came to Aweil I have been fascinated by the Dinka huts. They are such a typical sight in the landscape here. I love how God has endowed people in every part of the globe with the ingenuity and creativity to build houses from the materials available to them. One thing that fascinates and impresses me about the Dinka huts is how they are built. It's quite a process, with both men and women involved, each gender having specific tasks to do.

Homes are built during the dry season, usually between January and April, when people have time since they're not working in the fields. 

This is the first of a series of posts on how the huts are built. One of the first things that is done is the preparation of the roof thatching. This involves the preparation of hundreds (or I'm sure sometimes thousands) of bundles of grass.

First, tall grasses like the ones in the back of this photo need to be collected; either the future home owners (usually the woman or women of the house) find them in the countryside and cut them or they buy them in these huge bundles in the market.

Next, little bunches of grass are tied into bundles, a process for which the Dinka word is "dut." Dutting is one of the tasks done exclusively by women, and it's very time consuming and repetitive. Sometimes women are hired to do this for people building a house. The little bundles are tied with strips of a certain kind of grass that are wet when tied on and then dry to become even tighter.

Many women spend hours and hours dutting in preparation for the thatching of a roof

This is my friend Aluel sitting in her yard dutting bundles for the roof of her one of her family's huts that needed replacing. Sometimes only the roof of a hut needs to be replaced, the walls are still good. (In case you're wondering, the goat is drinking the water that the grass "ties" for the bundles are soaking in. :-) Here is a video I made to show how dutting is done.

Oodles of bundles!