IN AN Australian borough an orphaned handyman, forty years old, lived in a recycled galvanized iron sheet garage some seven by four meters. When the shire town learned of it he was made to vacate his dwelling for, they said, it was unfit for human habitation. His friends had to accommodate him for the time and later to chip in for a small but decent house. A few blocks away were government bungalows minimally rented to retirees and single parents. The fenced two-bedroom units were complete with amenities, bath and living room, to us, they could be of the upper middle class. The poor among the Aussies could travel abroad once a year. Yet the point is that their leaders take care of their housing very seriously.

        This kind of concern is older than man. His earliest near-origin about five million years ago, the Austrapithecus found in Africa believed to be progenitor of Homo Habilis and Homo Erectus then Homo Sapiens (ours), had a cooperative group life in caves. Naturally, the better part of the chamber had to be used by the strong. As the hunters and plant gatherers gave way to producers, that was, domesticating animals and planting crops, the need for better dwellings took place, the lesser again to unfortunate. The Bronze and Iron ages brought the one-room house.

        The single-story structure spread throughout Europe in 9000 BC. It had baked clay slabs for foundation and circularly bracing the grass covering the roof, in turn, supported by large timber. Its crudeness borne out of simplicity took the shape of a cave. The rectangular type as we find nowadays, the megaron, (1800 BC) was introduced by the Greeks and the Romans. While the privileged built enormous villas surrounded by high walls, the large cities, crowded by families of servants, soldiers, and merchants, gave rise to multistory apartments called the insulae for the less privileged. They shared bath and latrine.

        The classical housing influenced the British. In 1728, the colonies had its homes based on the styles in the Book of Architecture by Englishman James Gibbs. The rest of Europe followed with Andrew Jackson Downing’s Cottage Residences (1842) and The Architecture of Country Houses (1850) on the lead. These practices placed its marks in countries colonized through European and Western explorers.

        Our country caught the housing fever in much the same way. Not the poor. They could not model from the tenements of neither the whites nor the slit-eyed. There was none. Propaganda never carried the ugly slum-dwellers, trailer people, or the ghettos. It was counterproductive anyway.

        After World War II, bamboo walls under thatched nipa shingles had helluva sticking romance with farmers. Those who ventured in industrial centers long afterwards stayed in shacks made of refuse grocery stuff, lucky for them with some money or the bridge or cemetery might as well house the living as seen today.

        What a good thing there is now Bahay Kalinga, an NGO making headway in building houses for the needy. It’s fantastic. They had struck the burning iron when rightfully hot then mold it into a desired shape. Read it from textbooks, with them, you get it from the School of Hard Knacks. Many LGUs are awed to acceptance, surrender, giving in effortlessly. How breathtakingly amazing.

        Heard of the 80 Kalinga houses in Camarines Sur where only three were left standing after the devastating typhoons last year? It’s likely the units had to fall apart: the footing was not even a hollow-block high, still bars were substandard, cement mixture, my gosh. But look at them folks in the houses, they’d salvaged what was left of the match boxes bringing them back to life. Nurtured values of the poor magnified. Lesson ha!

        The issue is many poor Juan de la Cruzes are with us. They are ordinarily left alone by sicko government to suffer in isolation and silence. To Sir Fulke Greville it’s no good for “grief is augmenteth.” Unhealthy to a legion marching forward to battle, unless of course, the objective is defeat, WHOAAA! How’s this whole thing to be greater the sum of its parts, WHOAA! It must be something in governance, so GMA proclaims, gut thinking, I know when moved.