The most common male crafts are those of mason, carpenter and smith. A lot of new building is going on in the villages, partly to provide for an expanding population, partly to replace old houses whose lack of amenities is no longer acceptable. The demand is steady. All villages contain some skilled masons and almost all new construction is built by them. During my stay only one unskilled man built anything for himself. It was a small guest room and its rather amateur appearance provoked mild scorn. Clearly one needed a professionally built house for prestige. Houses need doors and windows, and in special cases wooden floors, and these needs are met by village carpenters. Smiths make tools, nails, hinges and so forth, put metal tyres on cartwheels and shoe horses.
The masons in the two villages always worked on specific contracts. No one lived entirely by the craft of mason. This skill lent itself to export, and masons were potential migrants, though one or two who built village houses had never been away to work in town. The masons were paid about T.L.5 (12s. 6d., $ 1.80) a day when working in the village, three times an unskilled labourer's pay and about half what they earned in town.
Sakaltutan contained a family of carpenters. The father Ziya (S), vigorous but no longer young, had learned his trade as a young man outside the village and his three adult sons were all carpenters too. He himself no longer migrated but his sons did. He was kept busy all the time by orders, from other villages as well as Sakaltutan, and often worked away in his oda while neighbours came to sit and talk. He was always ready with a lecture on the virtues of hard work, and the need to maintain his family in decency. His brother farmed their joint patrimony, though they had separate households. He never disclosed what he earned but he certainly did not under-value his services, and would not have accepted less than the rate for skilled work. Just before the harvest his family and that of a rival carpenter, his father's brother's son, who normally migrated for work, were busy making threshing sledges. The putting of the flint teeth