The housing situation.
95% of the housing in Aishalton abides by a tradional wapishsan design. The roofing is made from sun dried ..... leaves, wooden beam supports and mud brick walls. House building is not constrained by planning permission, money or differing views between architect and homeowner like back home. Here, every man must build his own home as there are no contractors to do it for him. It would therefore be reasonable to assume that houses in Aishalton vary in appearance vastly as designs are only limited to: the workman skills and creative ability of the man who’s building along with the time he’s put aside to build. However this is not the case, most houses appear to end out being built in a similar format: one floor, a kitchen, two or three bedrooms and a communal room of some sort. I believe that the emphasis the Wapishan people place on keeping traditions alive along with the lack of an aspiration, that many people in this remote community seem to have, to strive for change, may provide an adequate explanation for this lack of variety. Having said that, every so often you’ll see or enter a house where a conscious effort has been made to break the trend, and different usually looks nice.....
Dave and I don’t live in the type of housing I just mentioned above, just thought it would be something nice to comment on before I gave a brief description of our living quarters.
Our house is part of an apartment block of 5 build by the government in the North part of Aishalton about 3 years ago. We have 4 small rooms, 3 of which are bedrooms and the other one which is a for the shower and toilet. In addition we have 1 large room which houses our kitchen and communal area where we eat and work.
We currently have running water (apart from in the shower) which is nice but no electricity, even though the house was installed with power sockets and cables. However, our situation may be changing soon... in our last meeting at school we were informed that a generator had been bought in Georgetown in order to provide electricity to the school and our house that is about 50 metres away. Although this sounds promising the other teachers in the apartments seem less enthusiastic as the promise of a generator has been going on for about 2 years now. I just think the prospect of not having to light a kerosene lamps at 6 each night to start lesson planning is too good to be true... It must be said that: ‘Burning the Midnight Oil’ is much more tedious when the ‘Oil’ is not just a figure of speech like in England, but is actually the thing that is struggling to provide you with enough light to work by!!! So, the electricity will be a big plus if it comes, but with the dry season having kinda started (it’s still raining heavy but not as frequently) our water tank will soon run dry, and with that we will have to say bye-bye to running water until it starts raining again (don’t know when that will be). I’m not too fussed though as Dave and I are both pretty good at getting most our water from the well outside our house, at the moment we only really use running water for flushing the loo (which has no seat).
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| My room, tidy as always!!! |
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| Friends and Family..... I miss you all |
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| The walls mean that Dave and I can chat whilst both in our beds. |
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| The large room |
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Spare Bedroom where we chill out some times
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Anyway as always I’ve rambled on a bit but dotted in this blog are photo's of our house
95% of the housing in Aishalton abides by a tradional wapishsan design. The roofing is made from sun dried ..... leaves, wooden beam supports and mud brick walls. House building is not constrained by planning permission, money or differing views between architect and homeowner like back home. Here, every man must build his own home as there are no contractors to do it for him. It would therefore be reasonable to assume that houses in Aishalton vary in appearance vastly as designs are only limited to: the workman skills and creative ability of the man who’s building along with the time he’s put aside to build. However this is not the case, most houses appear to end out being built in a similar format: one floor, a kitchen, two or three bedrooms and a communal room of some sort. I believe that the emphasis the Wapishan people place on keeping traditions alive along with the lack of an aspiration, that many people in this remote community seem to have, to strive for change, may provide an adequate explanation for this lack of variety. Having said that, every so often you’ll see or enter a house where a conscious effort has been made to break the trend, and different usually looks nice.....
