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The walls inside Shannon's hut are a soft mud
stucco over mud bricks. She has pounded nails to hold her lantern
(far right) and the picture collages that her Mom has sent her in the
mail. The yellow fabric hanging from the ceiling was put there to catch sawdust created by termites. Shannon bought a can of insecticide and sprayed the whole thing -- yes, the whole can -- on the ceiling, but in the morning she could still hear them chomping away. It killed beetles and grasshoppers (and didn't do much for her own lungs, I imagine), but the termites were still there. Nobody seems to be concerned that the roof will fall down, but Shannon didn't like the sawdust falling down all the time, so she draped this yellow fabric (also some blue, not seen here) on the ceiling to catch the sawdust. The termites seem to be gone now, but she still has fabric on her ceiling. The "E" chart on the wall with the collages is waiting to be used to test the dozens of pairs of glasses brought to the village by Shannon's aunt and sister. The straw roof does not exactly meet the mud walls, so lizards and small birds come and go quite freely. The white plastic chair is the only chair in the compound. When the people in Shannon's family aren't sitting on a mat on the ground they sit on a small, hour-glass shaped wooden stool, 10-12" high, like the one on the foam mattress just to the left of Shannon in the photo below. |
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| Above: Shannon is sitting on her
mattress with her dad, John, and brother, Jefferson; her sister, Sara,
is sitting on the stick structure that supports the mattress.
Sara is holding a wooden bowl that was made in the village. On the wall in back of John is a map of Senegal. Shannon's hat is hanging on the other wall next to the open front door, and on the wall opposite the front door (not seen in this photo) is the back door that leads to the latrine area. |
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