Women use traditional equipment to pound rice grains into powder. (JP/Panca Nugraha)
For hundreds of years a community in Wawo village, Bima regency, West Nusa Tenggara, has upheld the tradition of using rice barns to keep their harvest yields.
Apart from strengthening the food storage system, the ancient tradition of using rice barns, which are called lengge, to house post harvest activities has helped boost tourism in the area.
The tradition remains today. The current rice harvest is now underway in the Wawo lengge complex, some 35 kilometers east of the capital of Bima regency, Raba.
During the harvest ritual, a number of women bring sheaves of rice into the lengge. The lengge's caretaker, who accepts the sheaves, later arranges them in order in the upper rooms.
If the harvest is abundant and all the sheaves of rice cannot be stored at the lengge, the women will directly pound them using rice pestles and bamboo staves. The rice grains that have been winnowed and cleaned are then taken home based on a pre-determined division.
"The lengge buildings were mainly built by our ancestors in the 1890s and they still function today," Jon Kari, head guard at the lengge complex, told The Jakarta Post.
In 1995, the government decided to turn the village's lengge complex into an historical heritage site. The ownership and usage of the lengge is still managed by the local community, particularly during post harvest activities.
The lengge site, which is located about two kilometers from the Wawo village office, is separate from local housing.
Inside the complex location, there are 96 units of lengge buildings, in neat rows and in lines with the distance at about 1.5 meters between each lengge.
The shape of the lengge resembles a platform house built using wooden materials with the roof made from rice straw. The floor measurements are around four by four meters, and the height reaches seven meters.
Four wooden legs as high as one meter support the lengge. On top of the wooden legs there is a kind of bamboo or wooden couch, or sleeping platform without a wall but with four timber supports about 1.5 meters high.
On top of the bamboo couch, there's a room with a wooden wall. This is where the food supply is kept. Its roof has been made from rice straw with the top shaped like a cone. To get to that room on top of the bamboo couch a wooden ladder has been readied, to be used when needed.
Jon Kari said that for a long time the Wawo community lived in uma lengge (houses that double as rice barns). But one day, there was a fire and all of the houses were burned. The household furniture and the food supplies were lost.
The local community decided to keep their houses separate to the rice barns.
The fire, he said, made people aware of the importance of separating houses from rice barns -- to ensure hope in the event of an accident or a disaster taking place.
"If the house gets destroyed, we still have a supply of food. And the other way around, if the rice barn is burned, we still have a house and a supply of goods and money. So there is still hope."
The preservation of the lengge serves as an example of cultural conservation and fosters community spirit.
When every harvest season comes, people get together to help the field owner carry out the harvest and store the produce in the lengge. The ownership of each rice barn has been inherited from the respective family's ancestors.
Rice continues to be harvested the traditional way. It is cut using an ani-ani (a small palm-held reaping knife for cutting rice stalks). The rice is not cut using machines so the stalks can be tied on the outside when the sheaves are kept inside the lengge.
When the rice in the lengge is to be used by the owner for a party or to hold a feast, some of the neighbors will help. The owner will pull down some sheaves of rice from the lengge, while the neighbors -- usually the women -- will help with the process of pounding the rice using rice pestles until the process is completed.
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