Makoko Stilt Village Pt 1 of 2
Lagos is full of people who have come to seek fortune, safety or stability for various reasons - the population exploding with folk coming from all over west Africa (and greater Africa in general as well...) This has created huge slum areas as the city can't (an will never be able to) keep up.
The slum of Makoko is quite unique as it is made up of fishing tribes from neighbouring french speaking Benin Republic who have built houses on stilts in the shallow lagoon off Ebute Metta.
If you were in space it'd look like this:
Click on the picture to get the full size version. You can see the slum in the middle of the picture with "streets" of water clearly visible
At the bottom of the satellite picture you can see the Third Mainland Bridge which links the islands of Ikoyi and VI back to the mainland. I took this photo of Makoko from the bridge. A dense blanket of smoke sits constantly over the slum as the inhabitants subsist by selling smoked fish around Lagos
Before I get into what I was doing in there, here's a few links about Makoko to give you an idea about the place (except the smell - that another thing entirely...)
- An IRI news article about life in the slum and the corruption...
- A UK Guardian photo essay
- An expat blog - one ladies trip into the slum
The kids are yelling "yabo" which means white man... (that'd be me)
Now, the reason that I spent quite a lot of time in Makoko from Janurary 08 to our departure from Lagos mid year was to build a school. During this time a whole bunch of cool stuff happened, so I've put it all together in one hit (split into two parts as there's so many photos...)
The Lagos Yacht Club raises large amounts of money each year at its functions to support local charities on or near the water of the Lagos Lagoons. In the past I had been involved in successfully using some of that money to build a school out at Ishahayi - about 45min by boat from the city - with a dedicated group called IBSF. With the hard work of fellow Aussie Lindy Edwards, IBSF was asked to develop and manage a project to build a school in the Makoko slum. For a few years various individuals and a few small groups had been taking mosquito nets and typhoid meds (typhoid and cholera are still major problems in the swampy slum) but it had difficult to do much more...
Apart from being physically isolated (you can only get in by canoe - most of it's too shallow or cramped for powered boats), the Beninoise fishermen who built the slum all speak french or fishing languages from Benin and Togo - no-one speaks English or the local Nigerian Yoruba.
Thus, with bad french on our part and passable pidgin English on their side, we met with the Bale (local King) and his aides to see what we could do to help. I'll say from the outset, that most "kings" I had the pleasure of dealing with around here to help setup schools or infrastructure have been more interested in what they personally can get out of the deal - but this guy was REALLY nice and always seemed to generally have the good of his community utmost in his minds during our dealings.
His dream was simple:
The vast swampy slum only had a hand full of schools - none that taught English - and more than 80% of the children worked. As a result barely anyone could read or write or communicate properly with the outside Nigerian world. No one could ever hope to leave the slum and the Nigerian Authorities treated them poorly as they weren't "nigerian". To gain proper independence and a real future, the Bale saw that his people needed to learn to read, write English - not just french as they had previously...
So we built a school together...
After a few months looking around the slum at two existing schools (that had already started to fall apart) We managed to develop a plan and started to secure funding. Part of the initial outlay was to be provided by the local women's group; who managed N50,000 - more than the yearly income of one family...
You can see the looks on the kids faces when the Bale (on the left - his vice on his right) took out the initial cash injection for the foundation work... priceless
As part of the receipt system we'd developed at IBSF we needed the Bale to account for the funds allocated. Unfortunately having something that can't be read by someone who can't write English didn't really help. Thanks to his trusty aides Noah and Remy who translated for us we got the universal sign for OK - a thumbprint
From then on over the following months, every time I took out the Bale some money to pay the contractors he requested a photo. Thus I have a collection of pics with me handing some bloke large wads of cash in small hut - all above board I swear.
Anyway, the school started off as a patch of empty water (about 1.5m deep in this area) that we needed to fill to create a solid flat area so the kids also had somewhere to play (is almost impossible to kick a soccer ball around here without ending up in the drink - and I guarantee you do not want to end up in the water...
In order to fill the school site we hired a bunch of large flat bottomed "sand boats" which are used around the lagoon to transport fill. Men dive down to the bottom of the lagoon with buckets and bring the sand up and over a day or so fill a boat. You get a few together, tie them up in a big raft and use a canoe with an outboard motor to propel them to wherever you need.
Here the Bale's on the job steering under the 3rd mainland bridge
(our fill site was 3-4km from the school site)
The sand boats arriving at the site
(The Bale's at the back gondola style...)
Then it's all manual work to shovel the fill out of the boats
and move it around. As the water drains out it settles..
Me and the Fill crew
Trusty Translators Noah in the hat (hiding a head injury)
and Remi at the front right in the white shirt
It took almost two months but they did it!!
Then it was time for the structure. We'd planned a two-storey (very rare in the slum, but a symbol of it's strength) 6 classroom building with a small verandah. So bring out the human pile drivers (there's no infrastructure in the swamp so everything's done by hand (generators are expensive...) and yes that's the king in the pinkish hat having a great time telling everyone what to do.
Where there's white folk there's an audience...
These kids are are checking out their new neighbours
Once the piers were in we could get on with the structure. It's hard to see here, but the Bale got a little carried away and extended each classroom by a few feet so we ran our of space and had to drive the last lot of pile in the water and come back and fill in an extra few metres later
After a few months we had a school!!
We just needed a roof!
A generous donation from a local businessman gave us all the aluminium we needed
so we could build walls....
... and start on the classrooms.
You got a great view from the scaffolding(so i'm told... I'm not that stupid)
Just over half a year later the community of Makoko had built themselves a School!! We'd spent every last penny we had and begged, borrowed and stole to finish the project, but the dawn of a new era in the slum of Makoko was about to start...
The school stands like a beacon in the slum - visible from atop the Third Mainland Bridge for all to see.
No comments:
Post a Comment