Making Stuff

(written 25 March 2012)

I was warned I might get bored in the village, life here being slower-paced and mostly devoid of the frenetic distractions that gobble up so much of our time in the U.S.--television and internet.  Almost a year in, I have yet to feel even one moment of boredom.  When I'm not working, enjoying a hobby-like activity, or doing general housework, I'm making home improvements.

A friend of mine is skilled and ambitious; he sawed down trees, dug into the thin cement floor of his house, and replanted the trunks inside, adding planks between the poles to serve as shelves and re-cementing the floor he'd disturbed.  With a few carpentry skills and some black lacquer, his house has been transformed into what looks like a spread in an Ikea Zambia catalog.

My skills are...fewer.  My tables, bookshelves, and benches were all made by hand by a local carpenter.  As a farmer's daughter and former wilderness camp counselor, however, I'm no stranger to tinkering and improvising, and as volunteers we constantly trade ideas on how to make things, both functional and decorative, for our homes.

My first few attempts didn't turn out quite as I had envisioned.  I wanted to make shelves out of pieces of bamboo.  A young guy, in a gesture of friendliness and an attempt to show off his manliness, found a bamboo pole and cut it down for me.  It sat in my yard until the weekend, when I cut off small sections and, with the assistance of several family members, bound them together with lengths of a thin nylon cord.  It wasn't altogether stable or flat, but it slightly resembled a shelf, and I suspended it with twine from the remaining long length of bamboo which rested diagonally atop two walls.  (The tiny shoots of bamboo stripped from the pole inspired me to try to weave a square basket of sorts, but it became obvious in about 3 minutes that I know nothing about basketweaving, even above water.)

Within two weeks--after my fingers recovered from the rawness caused by twisting the nylon cord--my shelf lost all shape.  Bamboo shrinks as it dries, so the pieces sat loosely in the string.  It couldn't hold much of anything other than a dishtowel and a few knives.

Around the same time, I decided to make a simple suspension shelf in my outhouse building.  Twine, wound around nails hammered into the baked mud bricks of the wall and pulled taut, would form a perfect resting place for toilet paper and feminine products, kept safe from the elements in ziploc bags.

Or so I thought.  The heads of the nails are small, and the twine kept slipping off.  Eventually I twisted and tied enough to make something resembling my mental image, and it worked well for a while until one of the Ziploc bags was reappropriated--probably by a small child, and probably to add to the makings of a plastic bag soccer ball.

Recently, I tried copying a friend's stovetop--nails hammered in a circle on a wooden base, to elevate a pot over a tuna can (or in his case, a fancy burner made from fused soda-can bottoms) filled with methylated spirits or another liquid fuel.  Only when I was done did I realize that my nails are shorter than the tuna can.

So I've figured out that home improvement may not work out as you plan, but generally there's another solution.  Innovation strikes at any time.  There's a plant here that, when the stem is plucked open, produces lengths of a fleshy fiber that becomes a stiff and strong cord once dry.  Two women in my host family used strips to bundle together some wood being carried home to be used as a traditional medicine.  When we reached home, I gathered up those scraps and wound thin strips along a thicker piece to form a circular ring.  Lengths of twine tied on provided a perfect place to rest a shallow sieving basket (not woven by me), which hangs from a beam in my living room and holds school supplies.

My cat, sourced after frustration with rodents reached its peak, soon figured out how to get out of my house (jumping up shelves to the top of the wall and escaping in the small space between the wall and the thatch roof) but not how to get in.  So I bought a hinge from the hardware store in town (about 22 kilometers away), borrowed a saw and plane from the carpenter, and set to work making a catflap.

Twine and long sticks, hung from roof beams, make great places to hang clothes, blankets, or anything off the ground (though my acrobatic mice still managed to chew a few holes).  My favorite family picture hangs in a frame made of fabric, cardboard, string, glue, tape, plastic from some packaging, and patience; an old pen wrapped in a ribbon whose ends are nailed into the wall with the aid of metal bottle tops stores necklaces; glass bottles covered in fabric scraps make beautiful candle holders.  And the world of citenge--the standard fabric here, sold in two-meter lengths and used for everything--has no limit.  Square foam cushions can be bought for roughly $6 in town; while making cushion covers, I figured out how to sew corners and made buttons out of sawed-off pieces of a shaved stick.  Pouches sewn and nailed to the wall can reduce clutter, and can be custom-made to hold anything from magazines to toiletries.  Rugs and doormats come to life from scraps of fabric, poked through grain sacks with a nail or wire needle.  And all manner of buckets and such can have small holes burned through with a smoldering piece of charcoal, outfitted with a piece of rope, and hung from a pole or roof beam by hooks cut from a long stretch of wire.  At school, where resources are few, the first grade teacher has taught me how to make glue by boiling cassava flour and water, and crayons with chunks of candle wax and pieces of colored chalk.  Flattened-out tissue rolls become flash cards, and soda flats organize books and papers.

Sometimes it takes a while to collect the elements necessary for a project; we use brooms made from all manner of plants, and I spent 2 hours with some sisters walking to a field to get just the right plant to make new brooms for sweeping the yard on a recent Sunday.  Not a trip I want to make every time I need to sweep, but the broom is certainly sustainable; the plants grow wildly.  I finally made a handwashing station out of an old wine box (spray-painted to look a bit more classy), duct tape, twine, and wood from a broken stool; I've waited so long because it took me five months to finish the wine.  Poking a hole through a bar of soap and suspending it from the water-box shelf by a string, I was as tickled as a small child at a water fountain to see my creation (hanging just under the eaves of my outhouse) functioning. 

That's the real joy--making stuff and seeing it work.  I could have bought a bucket with a spigot; picture frames, cushion covers, and shelves are all available here.  But in a place where so many have so little, it's great to see what I can craft with my own hands.  Because most people can't afford to buy these things, and I already have so much more than most people I know.  They know that I can afford to buy a handbag, but I hope I'm integrating myself into the culture a bit by sewing my own.

Additionally, since I'm still far off from settling into a home--this is almost the longest I've lived in any one space since high school--it's nice to watch my house evolve over time.  Years ago, I told a friend that I wanted to have a family home full of personal labors--woodwork, paintings, tile mosaics, clay pottery all made by me.  I also said I wanted to live in a hut in Africa one day.  While I meant these as two different dreams for different stages of life, he thought I meant them as one.  Turns out, he was right.  I haven't yet gotten to the tile mosaics (which here would substitute broken glass or colorful bottle tops for the tile) but my home is full of personal touches.  I have a beautiful, comfortable place to live, full of little hints of me, and untainted by the slightest hue of boredom.