Making the bamboo mat, tơnar in Kon Tơ Xing village : cutting bamboo

Y Gah is making a bamboo mat. It will be covered with a banana leaf and used as support to make pottery. This mat is called tơnar, which is also used for woven walls. To make it, Y Gah uses a knife called tơgăk. She makes a piece of bamboo regular, then splits it in two, then again in quarters. When she has slices of bamboo more or less 1cm wide, she slices them along their thickness, to make flexible slices of bamboo around 300x10x2mm.