It might be personal taste, but one thing I appreciate about our life in our particular corner of West Africa is having a full house. There are six of us in our two bedroom place – two small children, myself and my wife, and our two house helps (one who has worked with us for almost a decade, and one a relative). In the West, this might be seen as odd and cramped, but I think it would have been quite familiar to people just a few generations back.
For me, when all is friendly and full of trust, it makes for a lively house, full of people for the children to interact with, and plenty of laughter. We might have less personal space than elsewhere in the world, but we don’t have much to hide.
(This was a post fragment from last year that never got published).