The compound, or family home, in the photos belongs to the family of one of our assistant agents, Wandifa. He and his extended family - sisters, brothers, lots of children - all live here together in a big group. The living accommodation is now very crowded and Wandifa has recently got married, so the family has decided to extend their house. However, they have got very little money, like most Gambians, and they cannot afford to buy cement or sand to build their house - so, what can they do?   Like many Gambian villagers, they have dug a big hole in their garden, and as they dig they mix a little water in with the soil and make a thick, sticky mud of what the masons know is just the right texture. The mud is made into blocks with a special mould - they only have one mould, so they can only make one block at a time - and the blocks are then left to bake in the hot sun.   When the blocks have baked hard - it takes about two days to bake a batch - they are used like large bricks to build the walls of the new part of the house, with a much runnier mud mixture being used to stick them together. You can see the hole that has been dug in the garden, the lines of blocks and the men building the walls in the photos below -

- and the new part of the house is shown in the last photo. When the blocks have been built into walls and the roof has been put on, the outside surface of the walls has a thin sand & cement 'skin' plastered onto it to protect it from the rain. The inside is also plastered in a similar way and then - hey presto - they will have a new house built out of the mud from their garden!! Then the hole is filled up with rubbish and covered with soil so that they will have their garden back again.  As long as they can get the outside protected by the time the rains start, it should be fine. These mud-brick houses can last quite a long time - maybe 50 years or so - and most of the village houses are built like this.