How to Get a Good Night's Sleep In Your Hut

Ndiouma Diome's second instalment of village how-to work!

+ First get yourself a hut and maybe a nice little back yard space. This is similar to that other hut, you know, where you killed that mouse, snly you have grown up a bit, and formulated a better, more sustainable plan.

+The situation- As has been pointed out to you on numerous occasions, your hut is a veritable animal kingdom. Flys and mosquitos, or course, but also armies of ants and termites, ochestras of crickets, and all manner of other creepy crawly insects. Wasps take regular tours of your room, one style likes to bore holes into your roof beams, another prefers to make little mud hovels instead, still another just seems to like buzzing arround manaicly, irregardless of who is eating what kind of enjoyable breakfast. They come in through the rather large gap that runs around the circumference of the room, between the top of the wall and the bottom of the thatch. The wasps especially like to come in that way then make a noisy ordeal over trying to go out though the screen doors. And the screens on both doors are in bad shape anyhow. Children have poked at them so much that they are frayed and pulled apart at the edges. And the thatch is falling apart. At least it looks that way on the inside, with bits hanging down and falling off making a continual mess over everything. It even leaked last rainy season. Animals like to burrow through it, even make nests in it.

Through all this time, your hut has seen a fair share of lizards, geckos, frogs, rats, mice, a couple unlikely bats, a few snakes, several confused birds, a good sampling of the insect and arachnid sub-phylums, and even a couple of tragically lost chickens and at least one goat. Oh, and a cat, but its ok, he's cool.

Compounding this breachable-hut issue, is the regular breaching of you backyard. It is to the point where you think you spend more time fixing, repairing, rebuilding your stick fence, then you do interacting with your neighbors. You dread long trips that may last multiple days because of how bad it could be, no, how bad it will be when you get back. It starts small enough - a chicken (stupid chickens) will go on a bug hunting spree and dig out an area around the base of your fence, maybe enough for a chick or two to squeeze under. At night a rat may enlarge this hole or pay no mind to the dirt and just break off the clump of sticks above it. Durring the day, the cat finds this a convinient lizard stalking avenue and widens the hole. Chickens come in and can never, ever, seem to remember how the heck to get back out again. Goats see a well traveled opening and are stuborn enough to push on in through any space bigger than their head (and often smaller). Pretty soon, in the span of one morning, you can go from a tiny chick sized opening to a whole cow in your yard. Ok, maybe it has never come to a cow - thank your lucky stars your family doesnt own any.

And this doesnt even take into account the inconcievable actions of people. Kids see a walled off area as a challenge and a worhwhile game. But they are the least of the problem. Your fence is an old amalgomation of a bunch of pieces of fences and so, rightly it looks a bit rough, a bit haphazard. Your moms see this shambly ensemble as little more than a nice stand of dry organized firewood. They take from it liberally, nearly everyday, as my constant repairs indicate an inexhaustive supply. They also throw stuff up against it, rough firewood, stack things across it, bending and breaking it till it is no better than firewood. That is annoying to say the least.

Things need fixing.

+First things first. in your grand overhall, the first addition is a modest mouse trap. Expecting a bloody messy campaign of ridding the world of rodent terror, you are surprised, more than a little disapointed, and even relieved that not a single creature comes to harm from the trap (your fingers dont count). More than a couple hard candies and shiny bits of trash were carefully excised and added to a tiny hoard somewhere.

+Then you buy a new lenghth of screen. You replace the screens on both the front and back doors to your hut, setting them into place with low quality thumb tacs and clumsy hammering (more finger injuries). Screens also go nicely over the doors and the window, providing needed air flow for when the rest of the hut is more or less sealed up.

+Next is the roof. You go but some very tasteful blue plastic sheeting, borrow a ladder from the church and get to the (surprisingly difficult and exhausting) job of fitting the sheets up between the molting thatch and the wooden beams underneath. This takes a few days but makes everything look much better and it is amazingly more clean in your room. You realize how much airflow was permitted through the thatch and with it greatly blocked off, the plastic oddly flutters in the wind and the hut is just a little stuffier.

+Your next great scheme aims to tackle the huge space between the wall and thatch. First you clean it out. There is a surprising amount of hidden mouse treasures (and mouse poop) up there. Then you affix a couple rings of mouse poison in two popular corners. You have been very reluctant to buying any kind of poison. Poison means dead mice in mysterious locations. Poison means maybe a dead mouse under your bed, or in your dresser. Poison means maybe a dead mouse in your shoe. Maybe somewhere you wouldnt find it till it was smelling or breeding larva or something fun like that. Poison can also mean a poisoned mouse being eaten by something, like the nice cats, and then you have a dead cat. You eventually decided that you would be proactive in investigating anywhere a dead mouse might lurk and go ahead with it. Not the ideal, but youcant always been an ideal you guess.

Now comes the great fun, you have a bunch of old tree nursury sacks in your yard leftover from the previous volunteer. Most have holes in them and are falling apart, but you have been saving this small pile of plastic in the hopes of a project just like this. You pack sand into them, fanagle them as best you can, and shove them in to the space atop the wall, lining them up around the room. This almost looks like a cool interior design choice. Nice. This sack arranging takes a bit longer than you initially thought and you even have to get more sacks from your neighbor (who with a huge garden has a ton of old bags).

+Durring all of this, you go on an extended trip to Dakar, over a week away. As feared, when you get home, your back yard is destroyed. Destroyed. One whole side is more holes than fense, and the rest has been dug under and broken beyond repair. This... upsets you, to say the least. You almost want to go out on another long trip away to calm down, if that wasnt the most illogical thing one could do. Your mango tree you planted a year ago, your mango tree you planted with your dad, your mango tree, sweet little innocent mango tree, has been chewed on my goats beyond all powers of herbal healing. Several other plants and young trees are also eaten. Chickens have scattered your compost everywhere, scattered your pile of manure everywhere, The screen over your virgin attempts at a garden in this unforgiving soil has been trampled, young carrots and onions broken and killed.

The one positive in the whole mess of the afternoon that you come back to is the stack of brand new fence sections your dad bought sitting next to your hut. The next few days you and him work tearing down the old fence chunks (to be set on the firewood pile) and fixing up new posts and making the new fence straight, neat, tight, beautiful.

Rats helped identify a couple weak points of the new assembly. Late night rock throwing and later reinforcing with bundles of prickly sticks have discouraged further incursions. Soon after, the rest of the space in the hut was filled with tree sacks. The refurbishing is complete.

+Now, as the situation stands: over a month of an overhalled hut and backyard borders. The yard is not impregnitable, but the annoying things -rats, chickens, people in search of firewood, has become a much, much more managable issue. The mango died, but you have a large nursury that will replace that one and add a few more trees to the yard too. The garden is in recovery, a handful of carrots and onions fight for thier lives. Your hut is not impenitrable either, but it is worlds better. Much cleaner to start with. As of yet, no mice or other critters have decided to bore their way through the plastic bags into the indoor paradise of milk and honey (well paper and cardboard mostly). You have also cemented most of the cracks and holes in the floor things like to crawl through and live in. There are still crickets, less, but persistent. Ants but that is a given whatever you do. Flys are inevitable but if you keep the doors closed for as much of the day as possible, they turn into a negligable distraction. The only big stuff is geckos and similar lizards that you dont mind cause they eat bugs, leave your stuff alone, and are quiet (usually). You havent seen a mouse in your room. Most amazing to you is how well you sleep. You rarely wake up at all, let alone the hourly wakeups of before. This makes your alarm going off before 6 seem paticularly less sinister. You almost dont even need a mosquito net you room is so nice. But a gecko in your bed doesnt sound like too much full just the same.

+A lot could still go bad. The rainy season is the death of fences. Not just from the wet and mold, but from the wind that should be getting worse pretty soon. Sealing up a hut is nice for peace of mind but may be horrible for the hot season. The hut cannot breathe as well so may keep cool better, or may keep hot better, or both. The sacks could fall apart in a variety of ways. Even the rain and wind may ruin them or cause problems with the plastic roof sheets. Time will tell on this stuff and sooner than later.

Now if you could only aim all this productivity stuff towards actual productive work that helps other people...