Bike Rack Baggage

Here are a few things I've seen my neighbours carrying on their bike racks recently. (Bikes are the main form of transportation here aside from walking).

Groundnuts (peanuts) freshly pulled up.

A load of wood for cooking fires, perhaps going to the market to be sold.

A bed, with the mattress folded on top.

House Construction Part 6: Roof Toppers

Here (finally!) is my final post on house construction.

Once the roof is thatched, it looks like this. The ends of the last layer of bundles form a tuft at the top of the roof.











The tuft looks kind of fun and punky, but it's not very solid or waterproof.














This house has a more finished look, with what I call a "roof topper," for lack of a better term.

This is the most common kind of roof topper. It is made by tying bundles of grass very securely and placing them "upside down," i.e. with the tied part at the top and the loose ends on the bottom, around the tuft at the top of the hut and tying them together. 

The loose ends at the bottom of the bundles are then trimmed off so that they are relatively equal.

The picture below shows two women starting to make a roof topper. They are placing bundles "upside down" around the tuft made by the top layer of bundles. 

These ladies were actually making a topper for a rectangular hut. Here's a little video of one of them trimming off the ends of the topper.

It's common here for people to add a cross to the top of the topper. 

Close-up of the bundles tied together.

Sometimes they get creative and stick other things on top!

Two Graves

My neighbours bury their dead in a simple grave in their yards, usually within a day of a person's death. For the first days and sometimes weeks after the death, the family decorates the grave with a colourful cloth, blanket or mat. Over time, as the body decomposes and the earth settles, the mound gets lower and lower and finally evens out with the earth around it.

The mound of light brown earth to the left of the chairs in the picture above is the grave of a young woman of 15 who died ten days ago. (There is usually a mat on the grave but I took this picture first thing in the morning and it had not yet been put on after the night.)

This is a closer view of the grave. The young woman was married and died soon after giving birth to her first child. She gave birth at home, as do most women here, to a healthy baby, and then bled to death. Her relatives did finally end up getting her to a maternity unit several kilometres away, but by then it was too late. So tragic. Just one example of why South Sudan has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.

This is the grave of a one-year-old girl who died four days ago. She had a bad case of thrush in her mouth, making it very painful for her to eat or drink. Her mother took her to the government hospital an hour's drive south of here, but they had no medicine to give her. Despite the efforts of her mother and grandmother to get her to eat or at least drink, she ended up dying, I believe from dehydration. Her family didn't have the means to do anything else to help her. So sad.

Recent Pix

This is a small part of the road between where I live and our training centre/radio/school compound. I walk by here most weekdays. These days it's quite lovely, bordered on each side by a profusions of bushes in bloom. The yellow flowers with their red centres look so cheerful.

These flowers are all over the place. I took this shot from the same road, nearer to my house.

Donkeys grazing peacefully. The one in the forefront is literally at the end of his rope. :-) The one in the back seems to have pulled his rope free and is dragging it behind him.

Half of the Cush Christian School first year class, meeting for their Dinka literacy class outside under a large tree in the schoolyard. (These students are with teacher Peter Lual, standing, for the first half of the morning, then they head inside for their oral English class with John Alou, switching places with the other half of the class.)

The Parot Church women's literacy class meeting on my porch. During the dry season, the class met at the church, but since the grass-mat roof has quite a few holes, it's not a practical place to meet during the rainy season. It has worked out well for me to have the class at my house. Teacher-trainee Abuk can do much of the teaching on her own, so I can be inside doing other things, keeping an ear out and coming out to help or observe when necessary.

Bovine Bell Choir

Keeping on the theme of my last post, here's a little video I shot the other day when a herd of cows walked by just outside our compound fence. People put bells on their cows to help them find the cows at the end of the day, when they need to be brought back home for the night.