A House is a House is a House — or, is it?

Editor’s note: Theresa Morrow is the former Director of Content at Zillow. She traveled and lived in Uganda for nearly 9 months this past year, where her husband, Bill Ristow, was awarded a Knight Fellowship.

I just returned from Uganda where my husband and I lived for 9 months and here I am writing about real estate in the USA. Talk about reverse culture shock!

In Uganda, many of the mud and wattle (stick) houses are about 10X12 feet. The one-room house is separated by a curtain between the sitting area and a bed. As many as 10 people often live in these homes and

whoever doesn’t fit in the beds sleeps on the floor on mats. Outside is the “kitchen,” which consists of a small charcoal stove, and the “bathroom” is a shared latrine. Most people rent their houses, paying about $18 a month to a landlord who can evict them without notice.

I was writing biographies for BeadforLife, a group helping Ugandan women — most HIV positive and earning less than $1 a day – to help get themselves out of poverty through sales of paper bead jewelry in the U.S. When surveyed, BFL women said the thing they wanted most, and doubted they would ever get, was a house of their own.

While I was there, many of the women saved money from making beads for a down payment on a $2,000 Habitat for Humanity house. I watched a whole village of new houses rise brick by brick (photo at top). I photographed the women as they dug foundations, raised the roofs, and planted their gardens. Now the village has some 50 houses with beads drying on the verandas as if it is one big necklace of homes. The smaller photo to the right is of Tassy, a beader, and her sister in front of Tassy’s home. Tassy, her sister, and her sister’s four kids live in this home.

Of course, now that I am back in the US, the contrasts are all around me. Here, talk about houses usually ends in dollar signs. A conversation in Uganda would be different. If you asked these women about the value of their houses, they would never say, “Two thousand dollars.” You would instead hear words like “miracle” or “dream.” As my friend Ndagira Sarah, sitting in her new house, said, “I never had hope, and now I have hope.” Another woman probably put it best: “If you own a home, you are never really poor.”