Local work on making Nipa roof shingles made of Nipa leaves from Nipa plants. Nipa plant are similar but not the same as coconut plant. Their main usefulness a hundred percent is the leaves for building a Nipa Hut. Nipa grow in a marsh, moisture, sticky soil in the lowest valleys of remote places of tropical weather mostly edges around where ponding of fresh and salt-water met. It has the appearance of miniature coconut trees. It is planted by mother nature. Nobody can kill it. It thrives on salt-water/fresh water based soil and it may as well be the reason why its' leaves and center skin of its' stalk is very hardy and sturdy enough to make it as the number sought-after natural material to have used for building Nipa Hut. It is beautiful and very comfortable to lived-in. It must be harvested every nine to ten months otherwise, the leaves will withered and become useless. It also needed to be process for shingling in the same day as it is harvested while it’s fresh and pliable as what my girls doing in this picture. The men harvest, and the women hand work to cleaned, stripped, seam assembling each pieces of shingle.