In the Jungle…

The contrast between the people living in the jungle and people living in the richer part of the cities is startling at times. After going through a rich part of the town and then going into the jungle to look at the mud huts, is like visiting another planet. I’ve had a few opportunities to visit people living in the mud huts but taking the camera along is not always easy. They don’t like it when you just take pictures and usually you’re expected to pay a bit of something, especially since you’re a white man. As you can see in this picture, the main structure is made of bamboo and everything is covered with mud, which is then baked hard under the hot African sun. After a few years, the mud stars fell off and the termites have a wonderful meal on the bamboo. In this picture you can see the mud falling off the outside walls already. The thatched roofs are woven out of palm tree branches. The more modern ones might have a tin roof instead of a thatched one. The better ones like this one have cement bricks instead of mud for walls. The mud huts are rectangular shaped. I’m told that if you go further up into northern Nigeria you see the round ones, like you would see in a National Geographic magazine. Here we have a small pen made for keeping a few scrawny goats. The washing is done outside in the stream, which is also used for swimming and drinking water. It’s a common sight to see the children swimming naked and scrubbing away at their laundry, as you follow the winding river through the jungle. The clothes are strung out between bamboo poles to dry, and that takes a while in the wet season since the humidity is usually sitting around 90%. Quite often you see some children with their belly buttons protruding. I don’t know what kind of medical condition that is, maybe someone could inform us, but it’s not an uncommon sight. Since poverty is so prevalent you see many people with unusually deformities. Sometimes it’s from an accident, from which they never had the money to get it fixed so it just healed that way, or sometimes they were born that way. I don’t know what happened to the leg of this woman to make it so twisted! Sometimes in the city you see deformities that are shocking to look at! It does make you appreciate our well established medical system back home.