This is where our practice built the Italian paediatric clinic for the Italian NGO “Emergency”. It was a long and complex task, to a great extent due to the difficult social and environmental conditions, but especially to the limited technical skills available in the area. In this corner of Africa, we had first-hand experience of how poverty and war can destroy traditional crafts developed over the centuries, making these places almost incapable of building their own futures.

As usual in the case of Emergency projects, we tried right from the start to build the clinic using local labour and materials, but after just a few attempts to work with local companies we found they were unable to ensure the level of quality we needed. We therefore decided to go for self-construction, creating a company from scratch with refugees and local Beja nomads, as well as with Emergency staff. We adopted a participatory approach because we rejected the idea that companies should be brought in from the capital or, worse still, from abroad. We were well aware, however, that we would come up against harsh reality and find that the workers were often illiterate and sometimes lacked even the most basic practical skills – such as using a pair of pliers or a screwdriver.

The building site thus turned into a crafts workshop and, at the same time, a social laboratory where the local communities personally helped create a work of public utility. The project started out as a training course in the very basics of construction for the group of refugees who had embarked on the enterprise. It was a long and tiring process, but it was ultimately crowned by the satisfaction of having managed to self-build almost the entire clinic (excluding the technical areas). This meant starting from the main structure, the brick vaults and the walls in coral stone, and ending with the mashrabiya, the typical wooden latticework sunscreen found in all Islamic countries and commonly occuring in Port Sudan. This artefact turned out to be the greatest challenge, and it is the story of this particular object that I wish to tell.