The Life of a Guard’s Wife

Looking from our porch to the guard's house in the yard

Tragically our guard died recently in a car accident.  It has really highlighted for us how difficult life is for most people here.  One of his wives has lived in the guard house of our property, but he was never really a guard for us in the traditional sense (even though guardians have a long tradition here and you see several sitting outside their gates during the day on most main roads).  Instead he did odd jobs including driving a motorcycle taxi during the day and slept here some nights.  His wife is from a nearby village, and I originally thought her life here wasn’t very different than village life.  She sleeps in a one room house smaller than many of the dorm rooms I’ve had, with 2-3 children (her teenage son sleeps somewhere else, so we didn’t realize how he was related).  

The guard's kitchen in the yard (the fire goes between the three
blocks and the pots go on top of them)

She cooks over an open fire and washes clothes, plucks chickens and spends most of her time in the small enclosure of our yard.  Most of her possessions lay out in the open or in sacks around the yard, as well as some good sturdy mats on which she does various things from drying millet to resting with sick children, or visiting with friends. Soon she’s going back to her village to stay with her parents, as she’s not supposed to go outside to work or visit for five months of mourning, and so she needs someone to take care of her.  Through this process I was surprised to realize that her life in the village will probably be more difficult than I expected because of the things I take for granted here, like the water she can get from a spigot only across the yard (when it's flowing), the electric light inside her concrete block house, and the closer proximity to basic goods in the various markets here.  

We see so many other people napping on mats like this too

Hopefully she will have good support from her family and will find protection through another marriage, but we are still so sad for her and the even less solid social situation of her children.  Having a new guard will take some getting used to, but I hope to appreciate the difficulty of his family’s life and situation a little more carefully as we go forward.