Building in the blank spaces

Add to that extreme poverty and urban migration, and you've got squatters. The word is pejorative, but I've had the pleasure of living among them, and my eyes have been opened to what squatting really means. In sum, they're really nice people. They just don't have much, and do the best with what they have.

Our neighbors on two sides in Dakar are squatters, camps of families and acquaintances making their homes on lots otherwise undeveloped. They organize themselves around sources of water when they are available, keep their sheep, build small cooking fires, socialize. One guy builds out a little shop from flattened barrels and becomes our source for phone cards (credit for our cellphones), sugar, and salt. The neighborhood kids get their candy there (how the heck do they have coins for lollipops?). Another woman develops a niche business selling hot meals to the night guards stationed outside the houses of the wealthy (the guards tell me the food's great). Later I learn these squatters aren't even Senegalese, which explains why they don't understand a word I say in Wolof. They've come north to escape the troubles in Guinea (Conakry), and probably speak Peulh.

The men find jobs as laborers in the burgeoning Dakar construction business, the children don't go to school, and the women make do. Evenings the children file off somewhere with plastic jugs to fill up water for cooking and washing. Their homes are square huts, built from old wooden concrete forms, flattened barrels, layers of black plastic weighted down with big rocks. The better off take the time to pour a concrete slab so they aren't sleeping on the hard earth, but it's a risk - they don't own the land and if they're forced off, they lose the investment in concrete. No wonder so many just live on earthen floors. Inside is a cot with some blankets, some cooking pots, a shard of mirror for shaving, and some other necessities. But not much.¹ You could scarcely hope for more peaceful or respectful neighbors. With the exception of a single, barky dog (who we wind up feeding anyway, poor skinny thing), they are easy to have around.

I wondered about security, if theft would be an issue, if they'd be watching our every move. Turns out they're trustworthy, traditional, and generally great neighbors. They're grateful when we share water from our huge tank during water crises, happy for odd jobs and used clothing when we have some, and generally stay respectful, keep to themselves, and just focus on eking out a living.

Late last year, we returned from travel to find one of the lots empty. The owner had shown up, kicked everyone off the land, dug some holes, and begun building a home. A few weeks later, he'd stopped. Turns out the lot had been bought, or the owner had finally marshaled the resources to build out his property, or had now gotten the necessary permits. And everyone living there has been uprooted, the land dug up, and rebar-reinforced concrete is going into the trenches. Where have they gone? Some of them combined into another camp not far away; the others, I couldn't say. But they are gone. Wait, no they're not. They moved into the other lot. And the owner didn't have the right papers, so his project was halted. Who benefits from the land? For now, nobody but the neighborhood cats, it seems. That makes it obvious why they don't build out better homes than that, why even pouring a concrete slab is a risk with quite an expense associated with it: if the owner shows up, you lose your slab. And that brings home how crucial land tenure is to the world's poor: if you don't own where you build, you can lose the little you have.

Sadly, you can lose more than that. August 2012 brought torrential rains early one morning before dawn. I went up onto my roof to look around and discovered the trench behind the squatter village was a raging flood of angry, brown water. Everyone was drying out their belongings and mattresses, clothing, and sacks of food stuffs were up on rocks or tin roofs, drying. "How difficult for them," I thought, as I went off to work. It got worse. I came home that evening to find the authorities pulling a body out of the rubble: a 5 year old girl had been washed away by the floods and drowned.

Say what you want about precarious living conditions, no preparation, and perhaps even no warning the floods would occur. Blame the ramshackle construction, the indiscriminate dumping that clogged the watercourse with blocks of concrete and rebar. Or complain that the authorities permit (or at least don't hamper) squatters from settling in dangerous zones. It's hard to feel anything but anguish when you imagine the darkness of the predawn flood, the mother scrambling to save three children but only saving two, and the fear and desperation of the five year old, washed away by a wall of water that collapsed the home of paper and plastic she'd only known for the short years of her life.

Mourners

And me, I'll never look at the squatters the same way again. I'll never forget the wailing of the mourners in their bright fabric, or the sight of the tiny canvas bag carrying a body small enough to be lifted by one man. Here today, gone tomorrow is nothing less than the leitmotif for their lives. And even when you have so little to lose, you can still lose so damned much. In fact, everything.

1) Interestingly, but not surprisingly, among those possessions is frequently a cell phone or two. They're cheap to buy here, as they are throughout the rest of the developing world, and cheap to operate. And they do more to keep the poor in touch with each other, share job opportunities, and remain informed, than the Internet ever will. How do they keep them charged? From the electricity in my garage, with the complicity of my night guards, who run a little charging operation (for free, hopefully). It costs me nothing, so I don't mind, and hopefully earns me a bit of karma, which frankly, I could use.