Houses in Salone

Post by Lara

15 March 2014

A while ago, someone requested some photos of houses here.  Wait no more! Here's the scoop:

This is probably the simplest kind of house we see here-- it's made of homemade mud bricks with a thatched roof. These houses tend not to last as long as others, but if they're well-made and kept up they do alright. 

This house is mud brick as well, but with a tin roof (they call it zinc here, but it's most likely not zinc). The metal roof gets very loud in the rain, but presumably does a better job than thatch.  Most houses have a verandah under the roof, and that's where we spend our hot March afternoons (it tends to get up past 100 degrees most days, with high humidity)

This house is a bit of a compromise between the cheaper and more expensive options-- it's made of mud bricks, but faced with cement. The cement holds the bricks in place, and since the bricks were handmade probably by the family building the house, it was much less expensive to build than a concrete house would be.  Building a house here is not a huge civil engineering feat-- you don't have to figure out wiring or plumbing, or dig a cellar. What's left? 4 walls and a roof, basically.

This is an extra nice home being built at the riverside in our town by a Sierra Leonean who apparently lives in England.  It may be run as a guest house (an inn) once it's complete.  It's constructed off cement blocks, with metal doors and a metal roof.  This type of construction is built to last.

Here's another very nice home that belongs to the chiefdom speaker in our area (he's a big wig-- see the Jeep out front?)  This house was also built of cement blocks, and has tile floors on the inside as well as metal bars on the windows. It's one of the nicest houses in our little town.

...but this one's our favorite. This is our house (the right half of the building is, anyway).  It was built in the 1950s by the American and English missionaries who build my school.  Another teacher's family occupies the other half.  We have big metal doors, big windows with metal bars over them, and not one but two verandahs, not to mention the shade of 50-year-old mango, avacado, nem, and orange trees. It's a pretty lovely place to be.