Description: Houses

Most houses in Mozambique are made of local materials. In the north, a typical house is made of mud blocks with a thatched roof. To get the blocks, you dig a hole next to where you want to build a house to get your mud. This way you don’t have to transport the blocks, and you have a nice trash pit for when the house is finished. You mix the mud with a little bit of water and put it in rectangular (brick-shaped) molds to form the blocks. Then you let the blocks sit in the sun for a few days. To construct your house, you dig a small trench about 8 inches deep for the foundation, including the outer and inner walls. To lay the blocks, you start at the corners and work your way out, making a sort of step-pyramid at each corner that grows with each additional layer of blocks. To hold the blocks together mud is used. Sticks and string are also used in this process to guarantee that the walls are being built straight, both horizontally and vertically. When you want to leave space for windows or doors, you can put bamboos across the top to support the blocks above the space.
A typical house is about 15 feet wide and 30 feet long, in my estimation. It will include the main living room, two bedrooms, and a dispensary, which can be used as a kitchen, or another bedroom. Each of these four rooms will be based in one of the corners of the house. (The cooking is done outside, and meals are usually eaten outside as well.) It will usually have two doors, each exactly in the middle of the 30-foot walls, positioned such that if both are left open you can see directly through the house. If the house is made with just one door, you may not later knock out blocks to make a second door. If you do, someone in your family will die. It will have either three or four windows, all on the 30-foot walls. The 15-foot walls never have windows. An average house of this type will have about 7 people living in it.
Roofs are angled in the typical manner that one might imagine, with sloping sides that peak in the middle of the 15-foot walls. To make the roof, you first lay a tight grid of bamboos. Then, if you can afford it, (which most people can), you use rolls of what resembles trash-bag plastic or a very flimsy tarp to cover the bamboos. On top of that, you put roof thatch, which looks pretty much like straw, or like dried reed-grasses. Then, so the thatch doesn’t blow away, you cover it with a widespread grid of bamboos. The peak is reinforced with extra plastic and thatch. The roof hangs about a meter in front of and behind the 30-foot walls, creating small verandas in front and in back. You will rotate your cooking/sitting spot around the house, depending on the time of day and positioning of the sun so that you are always in the shade.
Pretty much anyone here knows how to make a house. If you’re really poor, you will make your own, maybe with the help of some neighbors. If you’re not so poor, you can pay someone to make it. If you don’t have much else going on in your life, you can make the blocks in about 5 days, construct the house in about 6 days, and get the roof done in about 2 days, if the supplies are ready. All in all, a house can be made, from start to finish, in about 2 weeks. Most people don’t do it that fast because they have to go to their farms and do other stuff, but if you hire someone to do it, it can be really quick.
In the south, houses are often made of sturdy reed bases, with woven/braided banana or coconut tree leaves as the roofs. The bases will have vertical wooden posts periodically, which support horizontal bamboos, which hold the reeds in place. I imagine that the roofs are made in a similar fashion to roofs in the north, with bamboos and plastic, but I’m not sure.
I was going to leave the bathroom out, but I just decided to include it. Your bathroom will be separate from your house. First, you dig a very deep, but not too wide, hole. Then you put boards across most of the opening, leaving a 6 x 6 inch square uncovered. This is the hole where you will do your business. The boards are then covered with mud. This area is enclosed by roof thatch walls, using bamboos to hold them in place. The bathroom is roofless (I still can’t figure out why, it would be cheap, easy, and convenient for it to be covered, but no one does it!), which makes it very cold to take a bath in the wind, even with heated water, and very inconvenient to have to relieve yourself when it’s raining. A cloth can be used to close the doorway.