Matope

Matope
 
A close friend, neighbor, and village elder, Musa and I took a tour of an area located just across the dirt road from where I live. I was in search of three young teenage orphans who recently moved there. One of the boys, Jackson, is enrolled at the Marianist learning metal work. He is young and timid and I wanted to get an impression of how they are surviving, to see if I needed to assist in anyway. We got to the house and it was padlocked up with no one home.

We entered and exited the area in different ways so I could see a lot and greet many along the way. It was a well spent Saturday morning. The houses are built very close together between narrow dirt paths. There is no running water and little electricity. The homes are designed like most, an entrance with a narrow corridor, which along each side are openings with cloth hanging as a door to small single rooms where families reside. There is usually one pit toilet that also serves as a shower for all the residents in the house. Water is carried in 20-liter plastic cans on the heads of bare foot women along the narrow paths. The clothes hanging on the lines were tattered and torn, small children half-dressed play in the dirt. There are places where human waste trickles across the paths. The land is still owned by the government who refuse to release it to the residents. The houses are made of mud and sticks and the roofs are metal which makes the homes very hot. The hope is the owners eventually replace the mud walls with blocks and cement, but this takes a couple generations to be able to afford and accomplish.

Pictured is a new house being constructed, much nicer than the others. It will have only two large rooms for two families. The manual labor amazes me. The well being dug for the pit toilet is 50 feet deep, hand dug through the hardened rock earth. It takes about 30 days to complete. One man is in the pit digging and constructing, filling a 5-gallon plastic bucket which is pulled by rope up to the surface and dumped into a large pile. The young man pictured is a husband and father of two young children. He lives next to the new build. His pay is about 300 shillings ($3.00) per day. Look how lean and muscular he is, they attribute this to eating ugali, high in carbohydrates. The young man picking the pieces of earth from the pit places them on the ground of the house while another worker pulverizes them with a sledge hammer. From there, they make a cement mud to smooth over the pulverized stone to form a floor. A lot of very hard work, but they are thankful just to have work.

Before we exited the area to stop and have tea at Musa’s house, he said this is our government, never to assist the people and this area we call “Matope” translated “ mud houses.”