Alulong na Dumaralos (The Farmer's House)

Around Bayambang's barrios in the olden days, the houses (abung) were mostly alulong, pinaur or nipa huts (or bahay kubo in Tagalog) raised one-story-high on four wooden or kawayan (bamboo) poles with their base buried in the ground.

With woven nipa palm fronds serving as roofing (often described as "thatched") and window pane material and bamboo slats for the flooring, it felt cool inside the house. Iron nails were used to a minimum, chiefly to fasten the bamboo slats on the wooden beams, but the major joinery were made of hard wood.

With a hollow first floor, it was especially airy downstairs – a fact that the folks took full advantage of by hanging a rattan anduyan (rattan hammock) in a corner. The members of the family took turns swinging on it. If you peered through the floor patiently enough, you would know who was there upstairs. It was best to be here at high noon, to catch a nap when everything was eerily quiet except for the soughing of the bamboo fronds and the susurration from the banana groves.

If the father of family is a dumaralos (peasant or farmer), the ground floor area was made hollow so there would be a space for the farm animals (duweg, carabao and baka, cow) and farm implements That, or it was a precaution against the perennial occurrence of flood during the typhoon season.

Other households who were not into farming might choose to enclose the space with see-through panels made of bamboo slats. Among other related house implements to be found in a typical nipa hut were the bayong (woven bag for the market), barang (bolo), an extra-wide-brimmed woven hat called takuko worn by women when it rained, and the bastikol version for men, which was paired with an abiang (anahaw) frond raincoat called kalapiaw.

Going up and down the nipa hut was a fearsome thing to the uninitiated. It meant climbing up a bamboo stairs about two meters high with steps fashioned from bamboo poles. Care must be taken with each step lest one stepped on the air in between the gaps and succumbed to the law of gravity. It was kind of like the opposite of dancing the tinikling, with upward moves. At the landing, a set of wooden ambassador-type of chairs greeted the visitor along the receiving area, which was what passed for the living room.

Like all nipa huts, the rooms were bright, spacious and almost empty and bordered only by flimsy walls of woven nipa palm fronds, if not sawali or thin bamboo strips woven in criss-cross pattern. One could easily enter all the rooms, whose doors seemed to be more 'like mere suggestions.' The typical visitor had enough sense of shame, however, not to barge into the master’s bedroom uninvited, despite its inviting openness. Like the fence-less, gate-less property of most residents, there was an invisible line that an outsider could not traverse. This feature of the traditional Filipino hut -- and Filipino culture in general -- has been described by anthropologist Fernando Nakpil-Zialcita as "diaphanousness." This openness or porosity is indicative of a closely knit community -- one whose members would show up for tagnawa (bayanihan) -- for free -- at the sound of the kungkong or the tambuyog just as much as they would gather at someone's home at a padasal in celebration of a major life event. It was not uncommon for neighbors to borrow certain household items from each other or exchange dishes of the day -- after all, everyone knew what one was having for breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

At night, the folks used hasag, a large glass lamp fueled by kerosene that gave a strong white light, like fluorescent light. One lighted the wick by pumping the kerosene with a lever and using a lighted matchstick. By bedtime, one only had to spread a buri mat (or banig, locally called ikamen) on the bamboo floor anywhere there was no foot traffic and freely lie down, without a care in the world. There might be a bed made of bamboo (papag) or wood (katre), furnished with danganan (pillows), ules (blanket), and muskitero (mosquito net). But there was no need for electric fans, as the cool air entered from the wide retractable windows and seeped from downstairs through the spaces in between the slatted flooring.

A typical barrio home of a farmer's family had only one concession to modernity – a phonograph – but that was when electricity finally came to town in the late 1970s.

The drinking water was kept in the buyog or buyugan, a big, fat earthen jug with a small mouth and a little solid-aluminum faucet near the bottom. Curiously, no matter how hot and humid the weather was, the drinking water always gushed out refreshingly cold. Another clay jug for storing water is called pasig, and it may also be used for buro-making and to store other preserved food.

The tasks of gathering and chopping firewood and fetching water from the manually pumped (artesian) well on the ground fell literally on the shoulders of the men, who had to use a wooden carrier to carry a pair of pails at a time. The rest of the home chores were done by the women. The use of firewood for the clay stove (dalikan) made the bottom of clay pots (banga), iron rice pots (kaldero), and iron woks (kawali) jet-back with soot, thus the necessity of using a tabletop implement called liken where one placed the sooty pots and pans. Interestingly, the indigenous word for plate is ilupan, whose root word, ilop, means "to sip (soup, e.g.) by the rim of the bowl."

Other indispensable kitchen furnishings were the bigao (bilao), buksot (handle-free basket to store anything), pongkian (a large buksot to store rice), and wicker baskets which were hung in a wire to store or keep cooked food away from ants and other insects.There were also the igar na niyog or coconut grater and gilingan na mais or manual corn grinder made of a pair of hewn stone. A wooden platera cabinet might serve as cupboard. Before the Spanish era, households used dining ware made of fashioned bamboo and polished lapis (coconut shell), whether as lusor (bowl), kopita (cup), balaok (ladle), aklo (rice ladle) or some other implement. In the absence of a dining table, whether it be high or the low table called dulang, the family ate while sitting -- their bottoms on the floor and their thighs crossed -- around the day's meal.

The women and children especially took the task of cleaning the dishes, which they did in a protruding part of the kitchen called banggera or banggeraan, the rectangular borders of which ended in a wooden 'fence' upon which rested, upside down, all the drinking glasses they had washed. All the suds and rinsing water came down in a cascade as they fell through the gaps of the slatted bamboo sink. The water fell down to the basaan on the ground where huge river stones are placed.
Inside the bathroom called batalan, one followed the same method of disposing of the water. The lady of the house washed clothes here using the tin bottlecap-shaped batya and tabig (palo-palo or wooden clothes-whipper) -- if she is not inclined to wash at the nearby river.

When it came to toilet ablutions, however, one had to go downstairs and walk several steps toward the nipa outhouse, which had a pit-style toilet (what they called Antipolo-type), a smallish digging in the ground. One had to gingerly step on the pair of wooden planks installed at ground level to do things right. This was, of course, a most scary part of the house, especially at night, for it never had any hasag on for lighting. One might bring a gasoline-fueled kingki (tinterwan) or tin lamp instead as alternative.

In case the farmer could afford it and had an adjoining space, he also built a garong, a biggish wooden box to store his ilik (the harvested pagey, palay or unhusked rice grains), or the bigger camalir (granary). In this area could be found tiklis (bamboo basket) filled with farm produce such as onions or, at an upraised corner, an ubong na manok (bamboo basket used as chicken nest) called baki. At the farm, he might also have a little resthouse, a hastily made miniature version of the nipa hut. In the field, the farmer and his family used cut-up banana trunks as plates and banana leaves as food wrap come lunch time.

A separate kubo might also be present near the alulong, to house the pigs being fattened for the annual barrio fiesta.

Today, the alulong has become more of a rarity than the norm as households 'upgrade' to concrete bungalows. Let's face it -- through time, alulongs have come to be associated with lower socioeconomic status together with such pejorative terms as "taga-uma" and "barriotic." Even though it is most suited to the tropical weather and features the use of native materials, it is not built to last for generations. It is also far more prone to fire, termites and other depredations, no thanks to the merciless tropical elements.

Nonetheless, the traditional nipa hut in Bayambang, just like in the rest of the Philippines, is -- to paraphrase national artist Bienvenido Lumbera -- "an ingeniously woven basket" that has served its purpose well and continues to, despite its relative fragility. But here, the basket stands on four long feet that look almost like stilts. Preserving the architectural knowhow, at least, is of utmost necessity as part of our cultural identity and heritage.

References and Notes:

Lumbera, Bienvenido. "Early Shelters and Houses" in Tuklas Sining: Essays on the Philippine Arts. Accessed February 5, 2014. http://philippineculture.ph/.../Early-Shelters-and-Houses...

Zialcita, Fernando Nakpil. "Authentic Though Not Exotic: Essays on Filipino Identity." Ateneo University Press, 2005.

Augusto Villalon's column piece in the Philippine Daily Inquirer comparing the bahay na bato of Vigan (Ilocos Sur) versus that of Taal (Batangas) is another source of insight on Filipino houses' comparative porousness.

According to National Commission on Culture and the Arts resident anthropologist Dr. Jesus Peralta's count, there are 57 types of house architecture in the Philippines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyp_-RFDQIE

Special thanks to Melchor Orpilla for helping validate many of the Pangasinan terms used.