Sometimes the humanitarian and the local community are both wrong. Sometimes compromise means trying something new.
I’ve talked before about the stubbornness of Ghanaians when it comes to their local building techniques. Many of them are resistant to innovation when it comes to construction—at least in the rural area where we live. In their minds, they have found something that works, stands, and lasts long enough to satisfy their purposes. We have to be very careful to hear them out; it’s possible—probable even—that they know something that we don’t. Occasionally, we have to stand our ground and say that we have an innovation that fixes a problem they’ve been tolerating all their lives (like our hanging roof). Sometimes we have to admit that neither our design nor theirs satisfies the needs of the community. The windows and doors are such an instance.
We came to Ghana with this great design that featured these variously long windows with louver blades (which we knew was a favorite local window). They were designed to provide natural light, airflow, and aesthetic appeal. When we began talking windows with the people here, we realized that they didn’t have that variety of window sizes because, well, aesthetics really means something different here and it’s much lower on the list of priorities. So we were wrong in what we thought we could do, but then we noticed something troubling about their design as well.
Windows in Ghana feature three layers: lever-operated glass blades, steel bars, and a fixed screen. The whole thing is cumbersome, ugly, and prohibits a great deal of airflow. Realizing that I needed to modify our design, but that the local design was inefficient, I sat down with three key locals I’ve been working with to deconstruct why they have the windows they do. I wanted to establish the community’s needs and work up a design from there.
The screen, unsurprisingly, is for mosquitoes. This is great in theory, but in practice these screens get holes in them very easily—all it takes is a dumb bird, a curious child, or bad weather. In fact, a lot of them get torn during installation, negating their purpose from the start. On top of that, we’ve learned that Asisiriwa has fewer mosquitoes than a lot of other places in the country. Add to it that people won’t be sleeping in the library (when most mosquito bites happen), and maybe the screen becomes unnecessary.
The steel bars (made from rebar) are predictably for security. For a communal culture, Ghanaians are super concerned about security. They build compound walls with nails and broken glass cemented to the top to prevent ne’er-do-wells from stealing anything remotely valuable. I believe it was colonialism that taught them to be suspicious of each other, but that’s another conversation entirely. Regardless, security is very important to these people; if we don’t make the windows and doors “burglar-proof”, they will likely install something hideous and burdensome after we leave. So the bars need to stay.
I was really confused about the glass layer. Why do you need a glass window behind these other two layers? It turns out it has one simple purpose: privacy. Yes, the community that spreads gossip about two people fornicating because they walk down the street together values privacy. In a culture where villagers dropping by unannounced—simply because you haven’t been seen in public recently—is commonplace, privacy is important. Ghana, being made of humans, is also full of its own contradictions. I proposed that glass may not be the best way to achieve privacy. Firstly, it’s, you know, transparent—it just blurs the line of sight behind two other obscuring layers. Secondly, glass blades break pretty commonly in Ghana, and the rate of replacing them is unremarkable. Thirdly, louver blade windows allow in only about 80% of a breeze; the imported sliding glass windows that the assemblyman wants to use allow in only about 50%. Natural cooling is our highest priority, so we wanted to find a workaround there.
The design I came up with was simple: steel shutters with horizontal bars that can be woven with reeds or sticks.
People in the village here know how to weave baskets—they actually learn basket-weaving in their version of Home Ec in junior high school. So my idea was to make sturdy steel shutters and gates that the kids can weave like baskets; they will be thrown open during the day when the literacy center is open and locked when it’s closed. This accomplishes the community’s goals of security and privacy (the teachers can close the windows if they need privacy) and our goals of airflow, locally-sourced materials, and aesthetic appeal. The steel bars should be hidden by the basket-weave, but they will definitely still keep out book thieves (Come back during operating hours, Liesel Meminger).
The downside of the idea is that we have to have the windows custom-made. They have to be a certain size because the metal is too heavy to have really tall windows; they also have to be within reach of the librarians opening and closing them every day. I have found a great team of metal fabricators in a nearby city that will happily do our roof structure, windows, and doors for an excellent price. We need about $1,400 to fully fund the custom windows (12) and doors (3), which includes locking systems, fabrication, materials, transportation, and installation. The beautiful thing is that once we get the windows, doors, and roof done, we are on the downhill stretch of finishing the building. I ask that you consider donating something that will put us closer to this $1,400 so that we can literally throw open the doors to the first library these kids have ever seen.
