Alternative Housing

The typical house in Madagascar is constructed loosely out of general wood debris from the forests and roofed with palm leaves. A typical family of ten (most rural families have a mother and father and eight children under one roof) lives in a space about the size of a one car garage. There is one room where the whole family sleeps and lives together, and meal preparation is done on mats outside. Doors are a western innovation, although some families put sheer curtains in front of the main entrance. Houses are usually set in a yard about the square footage of a three car garage, unless they are part of a larger property. The fence is also made of assorted sticks and planks from the forests and tied together with natural lianas. A cement house is a sign of status and wealth here; my host family has a cement house about the square footage of my living room at home. There is one main room that takes up most of the space, and two smaller bedrooms; one for the parents and one for the children and me. In the yard is a shack for cooking, and two small cement walled rooms, one for the toilet and one for showers; it has a drain, a broken sink, and an assortment of buckets. The yard is fenced but not locked; our house has doors and shutters which are locked at night but during the day are always open. I had the luck yesterday to spend a day with the host family of my friend Carly. They are about as well to do as one can be in Southern Madagascar, because the host father works in a high level position at the local mining company. Their house was built and rented to them by QMM, and is built around more western sensibilities. It is built of aluminum siding and linoleum floors, and had a shower, a toilet, and a kitchen sink. In size, it is about as large as a four car garage ( I’m bad at estimating square footage, ok?) and has three small bedrooms, the bathroom, and the rest is open kitchen an slicing space. It’s furnished with everything one could buy if one took two thousand dollars toWalmart, including an enormous big screen TV but excluding paintings or carpets. I also had the chance to see the house he is building as his retirement home, once he has to give up the rented home. Since he is building it himself, with virtually all the resources a Malagasy could reasonably have at his disposal, it was interesting to get to see what his dream home looked like. The property was large, and consisted of four buildings. One was the main house, and it was average sized by reasonable American standards and made of cement. One was what would be best translated as the Rec center, where he planned to put in a game room; that was made of brick. The other two were wooden shacks, a large one (think one car garage) for the maid and cooks and their families. The other one was half that size and was for the watchman and his family of six. They brought us baked sweet potatoes to eat while we wandered around. Inside, there were two large rooms, which were big enough that an American wouldn’t quite have know what to do with the space. One was floored with cheap blue and white tile, and had a fireplace. Built off it was the master bedroom, a space the size of the watchman’s shack, with attached bathroom that contained the first bathtub I’ve seen in Madagascar. The other space was floored with linoleum and had a halfwall that sectioned off an awkwardly built kitchen, where the oven was running into the cabinets. The countertop was gain of cheap linoleum, but the cabinets were of old growth wood. You have to realize that that wood is easy to obtain here; he could easily have done his entire house in tightgrained hardwood. For the Malagasy, poor quality linoleum is more valuable. Built off the enormous open space were three smaller bedrooms, each tiny, and another bathroom which also had a tub. That bathroom opened to the kitchen area, though it was between the bedrooms and in a western house would probably have connected to those rooms instead. The focus of the house was definitely on the common area of the kitchen, rather than the individual bedrooms which could just hold the beds they contained. Each of the rooms had matching, handmade glass light fixtures which were beautiful and ornate, and would have been very hard to get in the US. All of the rooms were painted badly, so that the color was uneven and paint had dripped all over the floor. The house had an upstairs, too although that room was bizarre; it had clearly been added as an afterthought, and did not have full walls, and the chimney from the fireplace actually opened into the room. They expected to use it as a guest bedroom. All in all, the house was like a case study of how different wealth looks in Madagascar. Handmade and natural is cheap; it’s processed and factory made that’s hard to get, so the more it looks like Made in China, the more valuable it becomes.