This is the Way We Build Our Haus Kuk

Pacific Orientation Course (POC) is designed to teach us practical skills that we may need to use in our ministry (especially if someone will be living in a village), including how to cook over an open fire. In order to practice our cooking, we have to build a haus kuk (kitchen). Today the staff and local workmen gave us a demonstration on how to build our own haus kuk.

First we start off with the materials: bamboo poles, forked sticks, twine, a bush knife, and a tarp. We used the bush knife to sharpen the ends of the sticks so we can shove them into the ground. (Yes, I used a bush knife and didn’t cut off any body parts!) After whacking at the poles for a while, we deemed the ends sharp enough. Then we picked them up and gave them a good shove into the ground, wiggled it around, pulled the pole back out, and kept repeating until the posts were down far enough to be stable.

(We were very thankful that it rained last night…the ground was much softer than it normally would have been.) After that, we hoisted the bamboo pole with the tarp (for the roof) up onto the forked end of the two middle poles. Once we tied two more bamboo poles to the shorter corner poles (for stability) we secured the tarp to the poles so it wouldn’t fly away in the wind.

But a kitchen wouldn’t be complete without a table to eat on and benches to sit on, would it?! So the next step is to build a picnic table. Once again, we started by jamming sticks into the ground, four for the table and two for each bench.

Of course, that is a lot easier said than done, since the sticks have to be sharpened (using a bush knife) in order to jam them deep enough to stay put. Then we tied more sticks to the legs to make a frame, and used bamboo pieces for the tabletop. We used the twine to lace/tie the bamboo to the frame. For the benches, we used whole bamboo logs (sticks, stalks??? I don’t know what to call them!) and tied them to the support poles.

And that, my friends, is the way you build a haus kuk!