Weaving Walls and Sewing Roofs

Down here in the jungles of Palawan the people's homes are simple, made mostly of forest products, and last only a few years before the elements and termites take their toll. Then a new house has to be built. The Palawanos are the ultimate Do-It-Yourselfers. No Home Depot here. When Aming wanted to enclose the porch of her new house, she asked her husband to gather and split some bamboo for her. Seven varieties of bamboo grow in our area, but nap-nap is the best type for walls. While her baby, Mek-Mek, takes his nap in his little cloth swing, Aming is out in her front yard weaving bamboo slats into a wall section. Each long section of split bamboo is woven over two and under two, then pounded with a wooden bat to make it tight. Aming has a little puppy who "helps" her by chewing on the ends of the slats.

Nili and her husband are building a new house. While Udi does the carpentry work on the house frame, Nili sews leaves over a bamboo slat for roofing shingles. Udi gathered the leaves for her from the forest. They are from the gumbia palm and are a bit thorny on the edges, so they cut up Nili's hands if she isn't careful. What she is sewing with is a thin strand of rattan, also gathered from the forest. Her little girl, Dilwini, sits nearby, overseeing the process. Nili has several stacks of already-made roofing shingles drying in her yard, ready to go on the house.

And me? Well, I'm not building a home right now, but I'm building my Palawano language repertoire. As I go around visiting my neighbors, I take pictures of all the interesting things they do, and asks lots of questions about what I see. Then I ask my friends to describe what they are doing while I record what they say. Later, I will show the pictures I've taken to other friends I visit, and ask them to talk about what they see in the pictures. And I'll record that too. Then, back at home, I'll sit down and listen to the recordings over and over, to get the pronunciation and intonation of the native speech in my head. Most of the recordings I also transcribe, so I can study them to learn new vocabulary and verb forms and sentence patterns. Then out I go again, without the camera or recorder, to just visit, and practice the new vocabulary and sentence patterns I'm learning. As my language ability improves little by little, I can say more, and understand more of what others are saying to me. And as a happy consequence I've found while I'm building language ability, I'm also building relationships with the people here. I'm becoming more and more a part of the community.