In urban areas of the Philippines, high solid block fences topped with broken glass or barbed wire are the norm, but in rural places such as this, we just don’t feel that such a fence is appropriate. We’ve reconsidered our ideas regarding the kind of fence we want. This post is about building the hollow block perimeter wall itself. This narrative will continue until we’ve moved in to our new house. View it at /our-house-project-cement-blocks/Įarlier we described buying our property, why a wall is needed: We described shopping for hollow blocks and well tiles in an earlier post. In this segment we describe building a hollow (concrete) block perimeter wall and digging a well on our lot in Tigbauan. Now that we’ve defended ourselves and the fence project from political incorrectness, here’s a continuation of our posts on our house building project in Tigbauan, Iloilo in the Philippines. Read an abstract of Boo’s article (you have to be a New Yorker subscriber to get the entire article) at: If a relative goes overseas and sends money back, a hollow block house and glass-topped concrete wall, may well result. The poor have as good a fence as they can afford and always a dog to raise the alarm. In the Philippine context, everyone wants a fence, not to protect themselves from a revolutionary mob, but rather to protect themselves from pervasive ordinary crime. Basically she says that electrified fences, walls jagged with broken glass and security gates have gone up as inequality grows, “that however the rich wished to consider the details of the poor, the poor might fully consider the details of the rich.” The idea is that the rich build walls to protect themselves from a growing revolutionary consciousness on the part of the poor. Katherine Boo, writing in the Februedition of the New Yorker magazine makes what I feel are over-politicized theories on fences in the developing world. A first step in our Philippine house building project. Building a hollow block perimeter wall around our Philippine lot.