If you have
grown up in poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and you have found a way to escape
that life, you will realise the mention of corrugated iron somehow jolts the
memories you have safely stowed away years ago and will act as a vivid reminder
of just how bad things were in uninsulated corrugated iron housing!
When it rains in
Africa it does not come knocking at your roof politely but descends with such
angry force and within minutes streets are flooded. Living in a corrugated iron house was stuff of nightmare during this season or any other. When the raindrops
touched the thin corrugated iron roof, if you were asleep, you will jump out of
bed in shock wondering if 3rd world war has
started! The raindrops sound like a rapid fire attack and as soon as you get
your head around the fact that is it just rain, you won’t be able to hear your
thoughts again until the rain stops. People who grow up in these kinds of
houses (they are not fit to call them homes) have even built their own rainy
season mini culture. When the nightmare starts, you don’t bother having a
conversation because it does not matter how high pitched your voice is, no one
will hear you. If you were doing work that needed concentration, like school
homework or God forbid, in the middle of surgery, good luck to the patient.
This rather life-disrupting rainy season has it is good side, tho. If it was a
tiny house with large families, like most sub-Saharan African family structures
with no privacy, this is the baby-making season as it is your only chance to
have sex and be as loud as you want with no one noticing. You are totally
private and free to scream as you like, for once, right next door to your 14
kids, half of them teenagers who would be embarrassed to death if they heard
their middle-aged parents scream with pleasure like hyenas celebrating a kill!
During the hot and dusty
season, things get worst for corrugated iron housing residents. Without an
insulation to ensure the heat collected by the iron roof is not transferred
directly to the house, making it heat up like an oven, you can literally feel your
skull bake to the point where you can smell burning skin! The worst smell ever
and it is one of those horrid smells which tend to sit in the easily
retrievable section of the memory drawers. Those Africa-saving do-gooders with
their “less than a dollar a day” poverty theories don’t realise for people who grew
up in a poor corrugated iron housing every time we hear poverty, we retrieve
the memories of burning human flesh and the deafening sound of raindrops
hitting the roof. I want to turn the volume down on their
pulled-out-of-thin-air poverty theories as badly as I want to stop the violent
sound of raindrops on corrugated iron roof.
Well, I am glad
I was persuaded to visit and I learnt corrugated iron housing does not have to
be the ugly and horrible experience of my childhood. In fact, I fell in love
with these amazingly designed and grand homes. They have added so many
beautiful little carved wood details to disguise the sharp edges of the
corrugated iron to create more aesthetically pleasing homes than I was familiar
with. They also made them properly insulated so residents don’t have to go deaf
in the rainy season, suffer from baking skull in the summer or freeze their
balls during winter. These houses are absolutely gorgeous and human-friendly,
who would have thought corrugated iron could be this beautiful!
