How to live: A manual of hygiene for use in the schools of the Philippine islands

by Adeline Knapp

Wood makes a very bad roofing material. It decays quickly and is a poor protection against the rain. Then, too, it can hardly be built so that a great wind will not blow it away. Many roofs are now built of zinc, and for some reasons this is good material to make them of. If we have a zinc roof, however, we must build a garret between it and the living rooms,—a sort of air chamber for the sake of coolness; for when the sun beats down on the zinc roof, the metal gets very hot. This sort of roof is useful for catching rain water; after the first rain has washed off all the dust and dirt, then we may collect the rain water that falls from the roof into our cisterns, and have a plentiful, pure supply during the rainy season.

In early days roofs were covered with half-round red tiles. We see a great many of them still on old houses, but they are heavy, and dangerous as well during the typhoons and earthquakes that sometimes visit us.

Perhaps the best of all roofs for this climate are the ones covered with flat, broad pieces of slate, secured by wire or nails to boards and rafters underneath, but roofs of this sort are expensive. It will probably be best, therefore, for us to roof our house with zinc. If we have an airy garret between it and the ceiling of the upper rooms, it will be quite cool enough.

The rooms in our house will be very simple. We shall not have any heavy, stiff carpets on the floors, to catch dust and breed disease. Nor shall there be moldings or ornamental ledges along the walls, because these also catch and hold the dust. Our rooms shall be easy to keep clean. What pictures and ornaments we have on the walls shall be such as can readily be reached and dusted. A room so decorated that it cannot be kept free from dust and dirt cannot possibly be beautiful.

The kitchen of a house anywhere should be clean as can be, but particularly in this country. It should be on the north side of the house if possible, for the sake of shade. We will not, however, have trees growing very near it, even to shade it. They have a saying in the tropics that “He who grows a tree against his house invites death to his door.” This means that dampness and shade made by the trees growing too near the house breed disease and often bring death. So we shall have no trees nearer our house than twenty feet.

Nor shall any one be allowed to sleep in our kitchen. It is a very unhealthful and uncleanly custom to let the servants sleep in the kitchen. There should be no sleeping in a room where food is prepared. By morning the air of a sleeping room is always charged with bad matter given off from the lungs of the sleepers. Sleeping rooms have a chance for ventilation during the day, and all these vapors are replaced by pure air. But there is no time in the morning to change the air of the kitchen. The food must be prepared in the midst of all the bad gases that have gathered there during the night.

This brings us to think of what proper sleeping arrangements should be. Not enough attention is given to the subject in this country. The nights are so hot that people are careless. Many grown people and nearly all children sleep on or close to the floor. This custom is a great source of sickness. If the floor is of bamboo, the bad air from the earth rises through it at night. There is always a draft across the floor, from doors and from windows, and from spaces in the floor itself. When we are asleep the body is relaxed, the pores of the skin are open, and we are in every way less able to resist chills and the bad effects of impure air. Sleep is a condition of helplessness, and we should protect ourselves in it.

A serious cause of disease, which people are just beginning to understand, is the mosquito. We have only lately come to know that this insect is the direct cause of the malaria which is so common, and so dangerous, here. Malaria is a germ disease. That is, it is a disease caused by germs which get into the blood. The germ of malaria is a parasite which lives on the body of the mosquito. We can imagine how tiny it must be when we know that a great many of them find room to live on a single mosquito.

Now, when the mosquito lights on a person and bites him, these germs often get into the little puncture which the insect makes to draw blood. In this way they get into the blood of the human being, and there they increase in numbers very fast. They poison the blood, the person becomes sick and weak, suffers from headache and other pains, and very often dies at last of malaria.

We may learn from these facts how important it is that mosquito nets should be used in this country. Even if a person sleeps upon the floor, he should arrange some sort of protection from the mosquitoes.