Having a bath

Much of life in Kintampo is conducted outdoors at the front of people's mud-brick houses or in the courtyard of compound houses. Women cook over charcoal or wood fires stirring food in large metal pots or stand splitting firewood with heavy axes, children stand in bowls to be thoroughly soaped, others bend double sweeping the ground with grass brooms. Compound houses consist of rooms around a central communal courtyard and are often shared among the extended family. Some of the old compound houses in Kintampo were built with money from the cocoa boom of the 1940s with wooden shuttered windows and railed verandahs. However the preference now is to build self-contained houses and many of the compound houses are crumbling due to lack of maintenance.