Small African Village

The chatter of young children and women singing as the floor is being swept. The lids are being taken off of pans and the scrape of metal on metal can be heard. In the background music plays as the daily activities of the kitchen are tended to. Birds are heard chirping overhead. A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand (sometimes tens of thousands). Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighborhoods, such as the East Village in Manhattan, New York City and the Saifi Village in Beirut, Lebanon as well as Hampstead Village in the London conurbation. Villages are normally permanent, with fixed dwellings; however, transient villages can occur. Further, the dwellings of a village are fairly close to one another, not scattered broadly over the landscape, as a dispersed settlement.