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  ao
Po” you call out, because the door to a bamboo house
is always open, and you don’t want to come upon its
occupants too suddenly.
There is little chance though that you would.
They would hear your footsteps, or the hens would
cackle to see you, the dogs would bark.
The bamboo house lets all the sounds of the
outside in. You
shake off your shoes as you get to the front steps,
because you don’t want to track in dirt.
The bamboo house is often scrupulously clean and
neat. The
multi-purpose nature of the rooms dictate a clean-up
after every use, so upon waking, mats and blankets are
rolled up and set in a corner, and after eating, the
dishes are taken away and washed and any meal remnants
pushed through the floor slats with a wet rag for the
animals to feast on in the silong.
The bamboo floor invites air to come up through
the slats, pushing hot air up and out through the
shingles, cooling the house.
A bamboo house is always built to catch a breeze.
Windows are located for cross-ventilation by
builders familiar with micro-climate in the area, and
the porous surfaces breathe. All this ensure that the
house is cool on even the hottest days.
As the afternoon wears on it will
be time to prepare the evening meal.
The rice needs winnowing and the fire on the
hearth needs reviving.
The needs of the kitchen are different from those
of the rest of the house, but even these are met
graciously by bamboo.
The kitchen sits on an earth floor, bamboo walls
letting enough light in but leaving no space wide enough
for a wind to blow the cooking fire out.
And always to one side a washing sink on a bamboo
counter with a banggerahan, a bamboo rack on
which to air-dry the dishes.
Off to another side is the batalan, a
platform on which to wahs and bathe, enclosed for
privacy but without a roof so it can dry out thoroughly,
quickly.
The tradition of building the
bamboo house in the Philippines is at least 800 years
old, but other bamboo houses have been found in other
Southeast Asian countries as early as 200 B.C.
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