Morning drive

On Wednesday, due to circumstances beyond my control (Skyping opportunities…), I found myself still in town at 4pm, and, unwilling to make a trip to the village that might finish in the dark, I decided to stay the night and return early the next morning, in time for my first meeting at 8am.

That was an adventure I’m unlikely to repeat in a hurry.

I left at 4:45am, in the dark, very sleepy-eyed. The sky was just beginning to lighten as I reached the end of the tarred road, and, thinking I would be safe, I turned onto the dirt. But the dirt road drops from the tar, into a valley where they have cut the road down from where it was simply a track to ten metres or so into the earth, where a solid stone base forms a good foundation for a tarred road – the electricity poles still stand at the former level, but not for long – if the current rains are anything to go by, the man-made molehills that support the poles will not last a week after the start of the rainy season in December.

The dirt road drops from the tar into a valley. And the lightening sky disappeared just like that into a bank of fog. Houses were only just visible at the roadside, and it became almost as dark as it had been when I set off from town.

After a few minutes of bouncing around in the dark, a faint wash of pale pinks and blues began to push through the mist.

Then I reached the apex of the road works, just before the road turns into a dirt that will not be covered by tar for a decade or so yet, and just where the road soared into the sky again, I left the fog behind and shielded my eyes from the sunrise, breaking over rainforested mountains and waking villages. Another car stopped too, a Malaysian couple heading to town, they oohed and aahed with me without a word of translation being needed.

I jumped back in my car, reinvigorated by the cool air, only to round the next corner into fog with a visibility range of approximately… well… the end of my bonnet, basically. Thick, grey, gloopy fog that clung to the leaves of the trees and slowly poured its way over mountains and into the valleys I was driving through. Life tends to start early in the villages – I now wake up around 5:30am every day, like it or not, with the roosters and the dogs and the children screaming under cold water taps. And so, at 6am, figures started appearing out of the mists, the gaunt, hard frames of old men and women, baskets strapped to their backs, machetes in hands, off into the forests to forage for vegetables for the market or for home. Then children. Children alone or in packs, dressed in their traditional blue-and-white uniforms, headscarves on the girls, slicked back hairstyles straight off the football field for the boys. Even pre-schoolers walked along, some of them headed for schools still an hour’s walk away, tiny in their little blue uniforms but already independent, no need for a grown-up's hand to hold on this daily journey.

Apart from nearly nodding off at the beginning, and having to drive at 5km an hour, hunched over the wheel and watching for the first sign of an oncoming car, it was actually a pleasant drive, before the 30-degree heat of the day kicked in (that was at 7am). I even managed to get out to my first school by 8am - I was hoping for a little sympathy from my teachers, but it turned out one of them does the drive every single morning. Oh well. 

An afternoon's work

There's an enormous tree in front of my house. It towers above the path, five, or maybe six storeys high, with enormous leaves and strong branches, dripping with big, heavy, green fruit. Marang. Today the afternoon games included a raid on the fruit. A group of neighbourhood boys propped an old plank against the trunk then took a running jump, the plank springboarding each raider high enough to grab the lowest branch. Like lithe monkeys they swung up into the higher boughs. The last boy on the ground passed up a 4-metre bamboo pole, split at the end into a convenient fork.

A raider slid easily along a branch, both eyes not on the long fall to the ground below, but on the one-kilogram prize at the branch's end. When he was as far out as daring allowed, he swung the bamboo pole, whacking the fruit, or using the prongs to hook the bunch and shake it, until THUMP! a little spray of dirt, a frightened squawk from an unsuspecting chicken, the prize was won. When all the boys had dropped a few fruit, they swung down again through the kingly tree, landing on the damp earth to claim their spoils.

Drivin'

I picked up my first two hitchhikers today along the dirt road. The first was an accident - the man - obviously a worker on the wooden house being built at the side of the road, with his toolbelt and deep tan - was standing in the middle of the road flapping his arms; I slowed down to avoid hitting him and paused just long enough for him to leap into the back of my bakkie. He hesitated slightly when he realised I was a foreigner, but he must have decided I looked trustworthy for he smiled and, waving a hand, said "Go! Go!" in English. So I went. Very conscious of having a passenger clinging to the edge of my open bakkie, I slowed down quite a lot, but he still bounced merrily away over the rocks and ditches, periodically waving to someone else on the roadside. After a few kilometres, he banged on my roof, jumped off and waved goodbye.

My second hitchhiker flagged me down in the usual way, and, seeing his bowed walk and heavy load, I stopped for him. He was a tiny ancient man, at least a foot shorter than me. He put his three sharpened sticks in the back and then climbed (and that word is used in its literal sense) into the high front seat with his other baggage: an umbrella with more holes than fabric, and an old Adidas satchel, only barely held together by a few pieces of twine. He smiled at me, a big enough smile to show a single brown tooth, then he sort of crouched in the seat, close to the door, taking up as little space as humanly possible. The only other interaction we had was ten kilometres later, when he pointed at a wooden shack and said "Saya rumah" - "My house." His sticks had fallen down in the back and he couldn't reach them. I had to get them out for him. Mumbling apologetically, he hobbled home.

Progress

The electricity poles are coming!

Normally you might find me lamenting the encroachment of technology into the rainforest, but not this time. The people in the villages in this region feel so isolated and forgotten - they're close enough to town that they see the televisions and the newspapers and the fridges, and they want them. And whether that's a good or a bad thing, there are other things they want, which the new road being built and the electricity will bring to them. A link with education, for example - there will be better contact between teachers and the administration, which will hopefully lead to better teachers, once they are being regularly observed. Resources like the internet and English movies and songs can be used in the classroom, improving children's access to the language. It will bring them closer to different people, people who aren't like them, who are darker or lighter or wear funny clothes, or, yes, I admit it, buy food for starving animals (I'm such a weirdo.) And that will change the children, hopefully for the better, perhaps to be more tolerant and aware of other cultures.

Plus it means I get a fridge, and that is awesome.

It's not a done deal though. The poles are being put up at a rapid rate - I drive in on Sunday afternoon, the poles are up 42km from Ranau. By the time I drive back to town on Friday afternoon, they've already stretched to the 65km mark - which is just 3 km shy of my house. Wires are strung between a few of the poles, where the rainforest has been cut back; in other places they're waiting for the men with machetes still. But this pace is due to one thing: elections are coming. Elections are coming, and the men who want to win again are the same men who have been promising this region electricity for years. The poles are going up because they need the votes that cluster along the dusty roadside in this poor backwater. So we get a sudden show of support and awareness, and the poles go up, and at least the first few kilometres will certainly be connected to the power grid in time for elections. 

Those places that aren't connected by then, though, will lose out. Because if the party wins, they will stop the construction so that they can use the electricity issue as an election promise next time. And if they lose the election (which would be a miracle) they'll stop the construction as a punishment. Lose-lose situation for us really. So everyone is rooting for the construction men - I see them everyday outside a different house, being served lunch by a grateful populace. Local teenagers go out with machetes ahead of the crew removing branches and cutting back undergrowth to make it easier for the poles to be put up quickly. 

Malaysia is incredibly corrupt. Transparency International rates it 56th in the world this year. Money comes, it goes, it reappears in the back pocket of a prime minister, nobody does a thing. So when I expressed surprise in my first week here at the fact that electricity had been promised to my region every election for the last twelve years and every promise had been subsequently broken, people just shrugged their shoulders and said "That's Malaysia." Which doesn't stand up under scrutiny, as Singapore, which was part of the same country until recently and has the same people living in it, is the least corrupt place in the world.

At least I'm not in Indonesia, though, the most corrupt place in the world, where a colleague of mine (who is married to an Indonesian woman, and has 2 children) is stopped at immigration every single time he enters the country on his spousal visa, led into a backroom, and asked to pay an "immigration fee".

Orang Putih

So I'm in the classroom, getting ready to observe a lesson, and the teacher begins with writing on the board "Things in Classroom." (Articles are a problem for Malay speakers - they don't have any.) "What can you see?" he asks the children, who respond in a mixture of Dusun and Malay, the teacher translating and writing on the board.

"Eraser!"
"I see table!"
"Pencil!"
"Orang putih!" ("White Person!")

It's always such a boost to the self-esteem to be named as an object in a classroom.

"Orang putih" is a cry I'm becoming familiar with these days. My little house sits on what in this village counts as a major highway - a dirt track that leads to about half the houses from the school. The children are fascinated by me in school; the way I say hello, the way I write in my book, the way I look at their work, all of these are endless sources of laughter and amazement. So how much more interesting is the way I brush my teeth, or eat my breakfast? The neighbourhood children are at my currently-curtainless-but-not-for-long windows from 6am until long after dark, gazing through the windows, giggling if I look at them. In desperation I started to ignore them entirely - and that's when the calls started, as if I were a panda in a zoo - you know, the hordes of visitors staring into the cage, clicking their fingers and calling out "Here! Look here!" in an effort to get the panda focused on their camera lens. Well, my zoo visitors call "White person! White person!" When I ignore it, the calls get louder. One teenager rapped on the glass, but he soon stopped that - a white person might be more interesting than a local, but an angry white person is a hell of a lot scarier...

The house is slowly coming together, with some minor issues. I ordered some furniture, which got delivered by a pair of very dusty men last week, looking between the village and the orang putih with incredulity. My kitchen is still a little unfinished...

I still have no electricity as the generator I bought broke on the very first go. Made in China. I usually make an effort to avoid Chinese products, both because of the politics and the quality, but it's difficult in Malaysia, with its large Chinese population. Chinese products flood the market, and both Chinese and Malay-owned shops are full to bursting with rubbishy, flimsy, rock-bottom-prices tat - it's nearly impossible to buy good quality kitchenware in Ranau, and the first pot I bought cracked - yes, a metal product cracked - the third time I used it... The generator was promptly returned to the shop the next day, where I bullied the poor man into refunding me with threats of the consumer association. At first he refused, and said he would refund me everything except for RM100 (£25 or so), because when he resold it it would have to be as a second-hand product. "Yes," I said. "A second-hand faulty product." But he didn't seem to get the irony. "He very hard woman," he said to my teacher friend (gender-specific pronouns also being absent from Malay.) The next generator I buy is going to be Korean-made, the next pot German, and my new car Japanese.

Yes, I got a new car this week - a great big Isuzu D-Max, the type of twin-cab that's driven by young men who need a big car and bigger speakers to prove themselves. I felt ridiculous picking it up this afternoon, dressed from school in my Malaysian-style sarong skirt and pretty Australian flip-flops (thanks to my little sister Lisa!) I had to climb up into it, and when I sat behind the wheel, I felt like a little girl playing dress-up, only with a car instead of mum's clothes. But at least, unlike my Malaysian baby 4x4, I won't rattle like a pebble in a tin can when I drive out to the schools any more!

Screamfest

I discovered today why my teachers scream and shout in the classroom. I went to the first day of a three-day training session for the new curriculum for Year 2 teachers. In the Listening & Speaking workshop, one of the games the trainer suggested was "Student Scream." The instructions: "Students choose a phrase and then can scream it at the other groups until it's the other one's turn."

The trainer backs this up by saying "The louder you shout it, the more you'll remember it."

That's going to be the front page quote on my next report on Malaysian teaching practice.

The Big City

Discovering you're a country hick is never fun.

Arriving in Kuala Lumpur on Friday, my first thought was, gosh, look at that - they've got trains. Then I mentally smacked myself, and boarded the express train to the centre of town, where I gaped at the existence of internet-connected tourist information booths. A taxi drove me through buildings taller than three storeys, and past beautiful old mosques. And I stared.

My first action at the hotel was to ask where the mall was, having some shopping that needed to be done (apparently in Kota Kinabalu, file dividers simply do not exist, and shop assistants repeat my words like I'm a crazy person. "File divisions?" "No, dividers." "Divisiers? You mean a document folder?" "No, I mean a divider, and if I meant a folder, I would have picked up one of those pretty folders on prominent display behind you.") The man at the desk suggested 6 malls, all within walking distance, and offered to call a taxi to take me to several more. I blushed and walked across the road to the Pavilion, Asia's Premier Luxury Mall, and owner of the Tallest Liuli Crystal Fountain in Malaysia, as endorsed by the Malaysia Guinness Book of Records. Truly. I'm not about to admit that I don't know what a Liuli Crystal Fountain is, because the look on my face already marks me as the hick I am.

The mall is about 50 floors high and probably covers more floorspace than the whole of Kota Kinabalu, and it has a Japan Street, which has a two-floor shop devoted to plastic cameras, and authentic Japanese street food stalls. There are two art galleries, and one hundred and seven restaurants and cafes. Four of those are Starbucks. Actually, I think it might have been three, but I got lost and passed one of them twice. There are two car dealerships - Bentley and Jaguar.

I'm overwhelmed, and not least because I've just seen two women dressed in black sacks with a mesh covering their eyes buying sexy lingerie. 

I get lost.

Then I find the Nando's in the basement, and everything becomes alright again - and it's even okay that the waiters say "Yebo!" with a thick Malaysian accent, because Oliver Mtukudzi is playing on the stereo, and the vegetarian burger tastes of home...

Through the windscreen

I drove down to Kota Kinabalu today. It's a two-hour drive, and is one of the best things about living in the mountains - it's a stunning drive to town, with a different view round every corner. On good days, you can see the sea from the mountains, and the blue of the sky draws the green out of the land and makes everything a shade of turquoise. On good days, Mount Kinabalu hides around each bend, playing peekaboo, and looming above the roads and villages.

Today was a good day down, and a bad day up. 

A bad day is, well, it's bad for driving, because the twisty pretzel of a road becomes even more dangerous when you can't see for the rain, but the views are just as beautiful as on a good day. On a "bad" day, the blue mountains haul themselves up out of duvets of white cloud and drifting mists. On top of each ridge, the rain clears and the greenness of the forest is even greener for the wet. 

Then you descend a little, and suddenly you hit a bank of mist, and for a kilometre all you can see is the brake lights of the car directly in front of you.

Just before sunset, I was around 2000 metres high when the air around me cleared and I had a spectacular view of thunderstorms in the distance.

It rains a lot in Borneo - pretty much every day, and it's the dry season right now. We get around 4 metres of rain a year, which is a lot of rain, especially for someone who comes from a country with an average annual rainfall of 80cm. But lots of rain means lots of rainbows - double rainbows, triple rainbows, circular rainbows, rainbows that finish in your backyard... It goes a long way to making up for those four metres.

The Lower Kinabatangan

Perhaps the most eye-catching thing about the jungle in north-east Sabah is how little of it is left to catch the eye. On the three-hour drive east from Ranau, the commonest view is one of the oil palm, twenty-year-old dark green hulks, pale and tender babies, a spiky carpet from roadside to horizon. Palm oil is the difference between squalor and wealth for many families - from a single hectare, harvesting twice a month, a farmer can make RM2000 a month with ease, in a region where the average wage - if you're lucky enough to have a paid job - is around RM500. It's easier to condemn the palm oil industry when it doesn't mean the difference for you between bare subsistence and an education for your child.

However. Most of these plantations belong to Big Business, not Little Farmer. They replaced primary jungle with a non-native weed. The palms are a perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes, and malaria and dengue fever are on the rise. Pygmy elephants, unable to cross the fenced and guarded plantations, are trapped in small pockets of forest. The birds are badly affected - in primary Bornean jungle, you'll find more than 220 species; in secondary forest after cultivation that drops to around 60. Palm oil plantations support ten. Just ten.

Palm oil is in everything you use, from shampoo to lipstick to cooking oil. For the sake of my view, which is far better when it's of jungle, please check the label next time you shop, and buy the product that doesn't contain death and destruction!

Besides, if your lipstick's got palm oil in it, then your beauty regime is killing orangutans, and orangutans are quite simply the most touching creatures I have ever had the privilege to meet.

They're being poisoned, starved, maimed and orphaned in large numbers by the plantations, but if they're lucky, they'll be found and taken home by the Sepilok Rehabilitation Centre. I wasn't originally going to go to the Centre - I'd had visions of a cramped zoo. But what it actually is is 43 sq km of forest, and a team of amazing, loving, foresighted people, who gently coax traumatised orangutans back into an independent life in the forest. Starting in the orphanage, the babies and young adults are fed daily at a series of feeding stations, each one deeper into the forest, each one serving smaller amounts, encouraging the orangutans to forage for the rest of their meals. So far, every orangutan has become independent - some are never seen again, some return now and then, to show off a new baby or say hello to a ranger.

Part of the Centre's income derives from Feeding Station A, which is open to the public. You watch from a separate platform as a ranger brings milk and fruit to a platform in the trees, but the orangutans have little care for the separation, and as I was standing there, a young male came swinging onto the boards, loping so close to me I could have cuddled him.

After the sanctuary, we set off on a 90-minute drive south, to a jetty on the Kinabatangan River, the second-longest river in Malaysia, and one of the best-protected reserves - not that you'd think so to look at it. Even here greed has won over thoughtfulness, and in between ten pockets of secondary growth forest, the palm oil plantations are huge. In some places they start right on the riverbank, but there's positive news - the WWF has wrested back control of a 100-metre corridor between each forest pocket, and in most places has ripped out the palms and replanted indigenous trees, allowing wildlife to move more easily. The farmers are not happy, but they've mostly submitted.

At the jetty, I and my co-travellers board a speedboat to travel 45 minutes upriver to "Uncle Tan's Wildlife Camp."

The website and other travellers have warned that it's the roughest camp on the river, that there's no luxury, that it's extremely basic - in short, that it's no 5-star hotel. But I find it far above my expectations. Yes, the accommodation is a mattress under a mosquito net, and you share a cabin with five other people. There's no bathroom as such, and you wash from buckets of river water in the open air. On the other hand, the buildings are wooden and on stilts; beneath them is moss and water, turtles, fish and monitor lizards, and above is the forest canopy, filled with birds. There's a big eating area with a staff cooperative that sells cold beer (there's no electricity except for a few hours in the evening, but they've got ice). And everything's spotlessly clean, which is a little short of a miracle in Sabah.

And it's beautiful and quiet, and on my first night a spotted civet pauses in its prowl less than a metre from me, watches me for a minute, and then silently slips into the forest.

The guys who work here are passionate about conservation and the forest, and knowledgeable. One is studying birdlife, another patrols the nearest corridor in his free time to make sure farmers are staying away. It's all a world away from the Hyatt, my first experience of Borneo, and all the better for it. We're lucky enough to see four orangutans in the wild, and hornbills, and an owl during his nighttime fishing. Eagles glide overhead, and down on the forest floor, we get to see tiny frogs, and chameleons, and what the ranger insists on calling a trilobite - it certainly looks like the fossils, but aren't trilobites extinct? This place is pretty prehistoric - I wouldn't put a live trilobite past it!

I could have done with a few more days, but had to make do with the two nights of boat rides and jungle trekking on offer, before getting back to the village for work...

Mass Consumption

Ramadan finished today. At 6am the usual morning call to prayer came, but it was much longer than usual, celebrating the fact that finally today most of the nation was still asleep, and not frantically stuffing the last mouthful in before the sun rose, dreading another day without food. By 7:30, when I was having breakfast, the streets were already filling with children dressed in their finery - beautiful, bright, silken shirts and skirts, and little hats and headscarves.

The whole of Ranau seemed to be on the move. At 11am we joined them, driving to a nearby relative of our host. They were camped out on their verandah, an impressive music system blaring traditional songs, a long table bending to the pressure of a thousand different dishes - steamed coconut rice, satay chicken, beef curry, steamed beans and local spinach, stuffed quails' eggs and pumpkin in coconut cream, tiny pineapple tarts, chocolate peanuts and sweet potato cakes. Chairs were arranged around the edge of the verandah and some small bottoms were moved onto a mat to make space for us in the best seats, right by the cake table. We greeted everyone else in the traditional manner, shaking hands and then lifting the right hand to the heart, murmuring "Selamat Hari Raya" to welcome the end of fasting and wish our hosts a happy holiday. As we sat and munched, there was a continual stream of visitors from around the village - many of them were ancient elders, their skin so lined that their faces seemed to be caving in on themselves, tottering in on their own, often in well-washed, well-worn clothing. No matter how ragged, though, they were greeted with courtesy and respect by the couple whose house it was, who lifted the visitor's trembling hand to their foreheads to show the ultimate respect and then guided them to the food. 

Meanwhile, a computer was set up and a couple of karaoke microphones appeared. But when the eldest son took the microphone, it was clear that this was no ordinary cringy karaoke. He sang a traditional Hari Raya song in a deep and soulful voice, and then handed over to his little sister and her cousin - slightly unnerving to watch two slight girls in their modest Muslim clothing singing "her lips, her lips, I could kiss them all day if she'd let me; Her laugh, her laugh, she hates it but I think it's so sexy..." I'm fairly certain they weren't the audience Bruno Mars had in mind, but the pronunciation was almost perfect, and if it's a way into English for them, who am I to judge? The whole family eventually had a go, and many of them outsang the English-speaking singers - if only all karaoke singers were so good...

I read that food purchases rise dramatically during Ramadan, presumably because people are shopping on empty stomachs, and everything looks good, but the biggest and most dramatic rise is just before Hari Raya. I guess it's like Christmas - even down to the fairy lights that decorate houses, and the food hampers sold in supermarkets. Everybody wants to gorge, and impress their guests, and have a good time, and that has an impact on the shopping trolleys...

English in the Village

I visited my most remote school on Wednesday. Karagasan is right at the end of the road, the last point, stuck out on a beige limb on the map of Sabah. Past here, the road becomes a track wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side, branching off to tiny villages and farms. Most of the students board at the school - 35 girls, 34 boys, all squeezed into two small rooms from Sunday night to Friday afternoon. There's no electricity, apart from a little solar power that's used for the headmaster's office, where there's a single printer and laptop for staff to use, although the classrooms have all been equipped with useless lights and fans.

One of my teachers here tells me "What's the point in teaching these students English?" I can see his point (but only a little!) when I watch his class on animals and their sounds, and only one student has ever seen a horse. Also, the curriculum tells him to teach chicken ("chick chick") and hen ("cluck cluck")... There's also no pig in the curriculum, although most of these Christian children have pigs at home.

The children chant after him "HORSE! COW! HEN!" then it's time to match the animals and their sounds in the workbooks. I wonder around the classroom to have a look, but none of the children seem able to carry out the task. It turns out that only 8 of the 35 students are able to read - and this is Year Two. All eight readers went to preschool, which naturally gives them an advantage, but the other 27 somehow managed to get through the whole of Year One without learning to read. Why? "Because we don't have time to teach them, we have to get through the curriculum." Blaming the government seems to me to be avoiding the point that teachers only teach for around 2 or 3 hours a day, and, on average, spend ten minutes preparing. Surely in the other 4 hours of the teaching day an educator can find a free period or two to teach their students to read?

The highlight of the lesson is singing Old MacDonald Had A Farm - the students get so enthusiastic about belting out this song that we end up doing seven verses!

Elephants in the jungle

I had a slightly surreal moment this week, when a teacher invited me to break the fast at her home. Her husband works at the school as well, and when I said "I'd love to, but are you sure you have the time to cook with such short notice?" she looked at him and laughed. "She has lots of time in the afternoon," he said. "But when the sun goes down, and there's no electricity, and nothing else to do, that's when she's busy!" "Nothing to do but make more babies!" Su screamed with laughter. The surreality came from her appearance: a floor-length baju kurung (the Malaysian national dress - a long blouse over a skirt) and her hair scraped back under a tight headscarf, she's the Good Muslim Wife epitomised, and yet here she was making jokes about sex in a room full of male colleagues! Then she leaned over to me, patted my knee, and said "Well, Emily isn't married yet, so she has no idea what we're talking about..." and I had to smile and blush and mumble that yes indeed, I had no idea what she was talking about...

The berbuka puasa was, as usual, gluttonous - Su is an excellent cook. All the teachers were there and I got handed several beautiful, fat babies to coo over and practise English with (turns out the Malaysian for "Woodiwoodiwoo!" is "Woodiwoodiwoo!") Su's daughter Ca (you say it Cha) was also present, but extremely shy, and it took a lot to get her looking at me. She brought out her Maths book to practise sums with her mother - Su thought she was pretty poor at Maths, but I felt that getting a 5-year-old to answer 7+8= correctly was pretty impressive...

The next day, I was reading in my room, when a scratching came at the door. I looked up nervously: the day before I'd had to chase a rat out of the kitchen. The scratching came again. Then a corner of the black plastic that's taped to the bottom of the door to keep out scorpions was lifted, and I figured a rat probably wasn't smart enough to evolve fingers, so I opened the door. A nervous face gazed up at me from the floor where she was still clutching the plastic: Ca had come to visit. I sat outside with her on the verandah armed with paper and coloured pencils, and we drew trees and cats, girls and boys, suns and butterflies, and she named each one in careful, round script, a different colour for each letter. I couldn't believe how fast she picked up and remembered each word. To test her, we went for a walk through the campus. I marched ahead and she marched behind. Every now again I'd stop, and every time she would bump into me. I'd point at a tree and say "What's that?" and she'd shout "Tree!" and then we'd carry on. At some point we were joined by a gaggle of giggling girls, and a friendly but slightly slow boy from Year 6, and they all giggled and shouted their way through everything I could possibly point at. I pointed at the jungle and said "Elephant!" And they all shouted it back at me. I looked confused, and said "Elephant?", making a trunk with my arm and pointing into the jungle. They all fell about laughing and denying that elephants lived in their jungle.

The next day, a little girl saw me in the school. She came running up, her arm hanging from her nose, shouting "Elephant! Elephant!" 

My job here is done.

Getting the third degree

The children visited again on my second day. They were getting braver. Although the oldest one (Marlin) still translated for them, there was this amazing change going on. For the first time in their lives, they've got a reason to learn English: they want to speak to me. And so now they're getting together to work out phrases they can ask me. I hear them whispering...

"Old?" 
then another contributes... "What you old?"
A third says "No, no, How you old?"

Finally it comes, a tap on the shoulder. "Teacher, how old you are?" They've all pooled their knowledge and worked out how to ask me a question that they wanted to ask, not something they were instructed to ask by a coursebook or teacher. This is learning in action! Similarly they work out how to ask about my likes and dislikes, my marriage status, and my religion. I'm waiting for them to work out numbers, when I'm sure they'll ask for my phone and ID number. Even the boys are starting to venture onto the verandah, although they've yet to brave a question!

The religion one was interesting, though - I'd decided beforehand to be completely upfront about not being a religious person, both with teachers and children. So when they asked me "Teacher, what your religion?" I said "I have no religion - I'm not Christian, I'm not Muslim." There was a silent moment. Then one little girl blurted out "No religion?" I confirmed this distressing fact. Marlin managed to work out "Are you the only one with no religion?", so I explained that outside Malaysia, many people don't have religion, and they seemed to accept that. Everyone in Sabah seems to be Christian or Muslim, and there is very little choice in the matter, so an adult telling them that she chose not to be religious must have been a strange and unsettling moment for them. I almost felt bad, but then they got over it and asked me if I liked durian fruit. So I think it's alright now...

They all run off for dinner at the hostel (all these kids are weekly boarders, which is why they're wandering the school compound.) But later, I'm lying on my bed reading when a tentative knock comes on the front door, and "Teacher?" They've come bearing their workbooks for Year 6, asking for help with an assignment. Apart from Marlin, most of the girls have very little English, and their workbook was ridiculous, asking them to choose between three holiday choices and then justify their decisions. The holidays were all in Peninsular Malaysia and cost more for a night than most of their parents earn in a month. And I'm not even sure how many of them know what a holiday is. Still. I get them talking about it and they work out a short text. I suppose you have to start somewhere, but it seems a little remote from their real lives to be talking about 4-star hotels. The solar power finishes and the lights go out, but Marlin's friend simply brings out a torch and we carry on by torchlight until late into the night, chatting about schoolwork and play time and their favourite foods.

I love this job. I think I'm the luckiest mentor on the whole project to be in such a remote area with such a chance to make a difference to children's lives. The other mentors tend to live a short drive from the schools, in their own houses, separate from the students and teachers once school is over for the day. But me - I get to live on the school compound and engage with the kids all the time. My permanent house is almost as good - right by the school gates.

Then again, ask me in 6 months, when I've had a continuous stream of children coming through my house practising their English on me every day...

Into the wilds... 2...

I left Ranau early on Monday morning, though not as early as I'd planned. My alarm went off at 4:30, I woke up, thought of the drive out to the village, and promptly turned over to sleep again. I still left when the sun was barely above the horizon, though, and I watched it bloom as I followed the tar road north-east. It took me two hours to drive the 60km to Malinsau School, the nearest of my five assigned schools, where I'll be staying while my house is renovated. I drove through tiny villages, some no more than a gathering of two wooden houses with a water tank between them. Farm chickens ran frantically alongside the car until I pulled a little ahead of them; they realised I wasn't a threat and slowed to a nonchalant stroll. Very small piglets scurried after their mothers waggling their tails with excitement, and children walked in groups on their way to school, the girls dressed in headscarves, long blouses, and skirts.

Malinsau Village is 60km from Ranau and about 30 years away. The electricity lines stop far short. There aren't and never will be any plans for phone lines because mobiles phones reached the area first - but the tower closest to the school was put up just 3 months ago, and the generator that powers it broke last week. The teachers estimate they'll have no signal for at least three weeks until it's repaired. There's no treated water, no rubbish collection, no internet. The road is mostly mud and stone, and some sections are unusable during the rains. Many villagers have never even seen Ranau, because the cost of the "taxis" that ply part of the route is more than they can afford. And Malinsau is civilised compared to the last village in my section...

But the road's edges blend into primary lowland forest in many places, and the rivers are crossed by perilous hanging footbridges and wooden road bridges, and the leaves are alive with birds. I saw monitor lizards and an iridescent kingfisher, and in many places, I was the only car on the road.

My temporary home has a verandah overlooking a clearing in the forest, a flat valley floor where low, stilted, wooden buildings make up Malinsau Primary School, and children roam in gangs, crying "What's the time, Mr. Wolf?" in Bahasa Malay.

The children are fascinated by me, and when I sit on the verandah on my first afternoon reading my Kindle, they don't take long to form a big audience. They push and shove each other and get close enough to me for me to feel their touch on my back, but the minute I turn to look, they shriek and scatter. Some are a little braver. I'm almost about to burst out laughing when a girl - who I think knows I'm about to laugh - finally takes the plunge with "Teacher, what's your name?" She's a beautiful little Dusun girl who looks around 8 but predictably turns out to be 13. One to malnutrition again - none of the town children are as tiny as the kids out here. Through the 13-year-old, the kids ask more and more questions, and even move on to asking me about the Kindle. For a majority of these kids, who've only ever seen a book in the form of a school textbook, the Kindle is alien, and they are fascinated. Another 13-year-old asks if she can borrow it, and although I have to say no, I tell her she can borrow real books from me, and her eyes light up.

All the children seem keen to learn, but the system seems equally determined to beat it out of them. There's a lot of rote learning in English lessons. In one lesson I observed, the teacher wrote out 4 sentences which were completely disconnected from each other and showed no pattern, then she shouted at the children "The!" and the children responded "The!"

"Louder!" she shouted. The children screamed back "THE!"
"Cat!" "CAT!"
"How do you SPELL it?" "KAH! AH! TUH!"
"The cat!" "THE CAT!"

I was getting a headache already. And the worst was that the classrooms were divided by planks of wood that didn't meet, and that did nothing for soundproofing, and the Year 2 class next door were studying Maths, so our "THE CAT IS IN THE BOX!" was competing with their "TEN TIMES TEN IS ONE HUNDRED!" 

The teacher spent forty minutes drilling 4 sentences. By the end, the children had their heads on their tables, and I wished I could do the same. Then they all got out their workbooks to write the sentences out. Not a single one could do it.

Score one for the cycle of poverty and illiteracy.

In another class, the young teacher clearly had a strong relationship with his little students, who laughed at everything he said. His commitment was great, but he was up against the Kurikulum, which is designed by well-meaning academics in Kuala Lumpur and has no meaning for the children out here.

I couldn't resist a picture of one of the 7-year-old students at the board, her town-born teacher towering over her.

Coming to grips

So I'm still becalmed at the homestay in town, but, oh miracle, my 4x4 was finally ready on Friday and I'll be leaving this afternoon (Sunday) for the sticks.

Meanwhile, the homestay is a lovely, welcoming place, owned by a fascinating couple. They're very well-known in the area and every time I tell someone I'm staying with Dr Othman, they lower their eyelids and click approvingly. Dr Othman was an MP for a time, and is still a bit of a father figure for many Sabah politicians. Also, being fairly wealthy, they're the informal lending facility for the area. His wife, Lungkiam (also a Phd) was born into a Dusun Christian family but she converted to Islam when she married. The house is enormous and welcoming and populated by a number of different species - dogs here, unusually, are treated like members of the family; the field out back is controlled by several wild horses and foals, all descended from a rescue horse; the lounge area, which is wall-less and built out of wood, stretches over a river filled with koi. There's even a turtle in the kitchen - but I'm on the case and am hoping to persuade them to release it into the river.  A very fat cat moans piteously at sundown, but nobody's ever fooled into thinking he's actually hungry.

But the biggest reason for their most recent fame is a rather sad reason. In the early 1940s, Singapore fell to the Japanese. It happened very quickly - my colleague's father was one of the British army doctors caught up in the invasion. Prisoner-of-war conditions were fairly bad, but they became far worse for some of the men, who were transferred to Borneo in 1942-3. At a camp in Sandakan - around 60 kilometres east of Ranau - they were forced to build a military airfield using nothing but their hands. Then in 1945, they were forcibly marched west to Ranau. Because it was a massive operation - 2700 prisoners were at Sandakan - paths were cut through dense jungle to avoid the Allied planes. The prisoners had been kept in horrendous conditions for 2 or 3 years and they were badly malnourished and diseased; the route of the march is considered very difficult even today, with our modern equipment and technology. The POWs usually had to forage for their food - and sometimes they were helped by local villagers, when the Japanese weren't looking. Of 2700 men, just six survived the marches to Ranau - all Australian - all escapees who were hidden by villagers from the Japanese army, and only three of those survived to testify at war crimes trials the following year. The others - British and Australian - starved to death, died of disease, or were shot just after the Japanese surrender in August 1945. It's a very moving and sad story, and many of the descendants of the marchers come to trek the route every year. And most of them end up sitting on the same chair I'm sitting in as I write this. The exact route of the trek was lost for many years in the jungle, but was recently uncovered by a couple of very determined researchers, who found the site of the Last Camp - on my hosts' land. The site has been confirmed by a number of digs, which turned up cast-off buttons, old tins of fish, belt buckles, Australian army badges, and even an enamel mug. Dr Othman has pledged to keep the land undeveloped, apart from a simple memorial, and regularly leads teams of scientists, historians and researchers to it to investigate further.

On the tables one afternoon, he spreads out some of his finds to document them before they're turned over to the University of Malaysia, the hodge-podge remnants of the lives of the few who survived until Ranau.

But this sad story doesn't colour the homestay, which is a few kilometres from the camp site. Here the river plays backing track to an orchestra of birds, geckos and squirrels, and fruit drips from the trees - mangos and pawpaws, limes, pineapples and rambutan. The noise is incessant - the minute the sun drops below the horizon, the call of the mosque is almost overpowered by the call of the crickets and frogs and geckos.

Ramadan continues, and is now coming to the end of the second week.  On Friday, we were invited to one of Fiona's schools, in a small village near Ranau, for the breaking of the fast. We arrived a little late and dusk was approaching fast when we walked into the school's courtyard. Two long tables had been set up, and one of these was full of men, dressed in traditional sarongs mostly and wearing the songkok, a traditional hat. A few children raced each other round the other table, but there were no women in sight! A little nervous, we joined the head of the table and each promptly fell into deep conversation with our neighbours. They were so friendly and so welcoming, and so interested in our programme, that neither of us realised when the radio was turned up for the sundown prayers! We stopped for a local dignitary to chant his own short prayer to which all the men solemnly replied, something similar to the way Christians would murmur "Amen" during a rousing sermon. Then we all took a date from the plates on the table, and broke the day's fast with it. Or at least, the men and children did - of course Fiona and I had been snacking all day long :) After this initial fast-breaking, the men all disappeared for prayers, and while they were out, the women appeared and invited us to help ourselves to platefuls of food. The teachers had prepared the food in a sort of bring-and-share buffet, and although I was limited as a vegetarian, I wasn't complaining - I heaped piles of satay and steamed rice and curried wild greens onto my plate, and by the time my neighbours returned for their own dinner, I was digging in happily.

Unhappily for the Boss, who is a little man in a little job out for all he can get, my neighbour turned out to be his Boss, the District Education Officer, and we got along so well, we've been invited to break the fast next Friday at the District Office in Ranau - where I shall be sure to display my close friendship with the Big Boss...

Other than hobnobbing with the locals (the British Council calls it "relationship-building" and it's actually part of my job! It's a hard life...), we've been viewing a few of the local sights too. Today we went out for a "fish massage" which is a famous attraction in these here parts. You know the trendy salons in the UK that let you stick your feet in a tank for half an hour while little fish nibble all the dead skin off your toes? A pleasantly tingly pedicure? This wasn't like that.

We bought our tickets at a little booth and then walked down to another little booth by the river, where a smiley lady checked them and stamped them. We turned to walk over to where lots of chairs were laid out in rows and where we were obviously meant to sit and wait, but we were the only ones there, and we'd only taken a couple of steps before our numbers were called out over the tannoy - a little unnecessarily, as we were still within whispering distance, but there you go.

When we got down to the river, we realised that this is not your standard London establishment. For one thing, a lot of the fish are very big fish.

Basically - for that is the word for this fish massage, basically, which is why we were intrigued in the first place - a lot of river fish have been trained with the use of fish pellets to gather at a particular bend; you wade in ankle-deep on the sand and the fish swarm expectantly. You have a few fish pellets to give them, which they go crazy over, but in between being fed, they nibble on your feet.

It's pretty tingly. But then the big fish get involved, and this is not tingly. Not tingly at all. The big fish are very big, and their bites hurt. I jumped out a couple of times, but Fiona was braver - until she came out of the water and we saw her ankles.

I think we may have completely put off the Korean ajummas who arrived just as we were taking photos of the damage!

So. When you come to visit, and I suggest "a lovely fish massage", and you happily accept, imagining an afternoon of relaxed pampering at a spa, I shall know who's read this blog to the end...

;)

On the other hand...

You know that sense of irritation when the moment you give up on a bus and start walking, two turn up and pass you gaily as you walk? Or, more pertinently, you complain of an itch in the throat, but the moment you see a doctor, it goes away? That's a little how I felt today, when my manager came to assess the situation in my cluster and make a decision about whether it should be included in the program, and suddenly all the problems I had on Tuesday magically disappeared. Suddenly, I was able to move into teacher's accommodation at one school temporarily, and equally as suddenly, a little two-storey cottage at the gate of the most central school became available. The Boss was suddenly helpful and understanding. 24-hour power (from the school's solar panels) suddenly became available, and the landlord of my little cottage suddenly understood the need for an inside bathroom. Internet suddenly became a possibility, albeit very slow, expensive internet.


Suddenly my life looked rosier.


It's still a very remote area with very little infrastructure, and it'll take me about 2 hours to reach town (which I plan to visit every weekend initially), but with power, a couple of rainwater tanks, a fridge and some internet, I'm quite excited to get started! I'm just waiting for a 4x4 to be serviced and delivered, and then I'm off. Just look at my new home (bearing in mind that there's still a bit of work to be done!).

It was also great to have a chat with my manager about the programme - it really is such an exciting and positive thing to be involved with, and fits in well with a lot of my ideas about life. We won't be teaching English while we're here, but are "mentors" (120 of us, in Sabah and Sarawak) and will be encouraging teachers to think more deeply about their teaching practice. I like it because, unlike many other programmes I've heard of, we don't go marching in there and say "Right, all of you sit and listen to me tell you about how great the UK education system is, and this is what you've got to do in your classroom, right, now go!" It's very much about observing the Malaysian situation, and then getting teachers to work with their colleagues and their communities to make changes in the school and the classroom that benefit everyone, and which come from the grassroots level. There's a lot of support, but also a lot of autonomy over how we go about this. The big idea is that because the teachers themselves will be considering and deciding on the changes to be made, when we leave in 2013, the effect will continue, with those teachers helping other teachers and continuing to teach reflectively. The information that has already been gathered through observation and qualitative research could power a hundred post-grad theses, and I really wish I was doing a Masters so I could make use of this incredible opportunity!

Into the wilds

I find myself continually revising my expectations in Malaysia. Last week, when considering the house I wanted to live in, I told my local teachers "two bedrooms, a bathroom, internet and an outside space, please, thank you very much." Then it became "two bedrooms, electricity, and a bathroom." Today it became "Could I please have a toilet? Please?"

We (my colleague Fiona, the language officer, Rapedah, and her boss, and me) left Ranau early this morning in the Boss's 4x4. I know the Boss's name, but his attitude screamed "I'm The Boss!", so Boss he shall remain. We left the little town on good, solid, tarred roads, but they petered out about 15 minutes later and became gravel. Shortly after that, we were driving on an unfinished, immense highway, that seems to be leading to jungle, which is a bit strange. Unfinished, it's a nightmare, because it's simply very slippery gravel, about 100m across. That turned into sand and gravel again, but only very briefly, before it became a mudslide, heading down a steep hill, about one car's width across. Each time we drove through a village, the road became momentarily usable again, but villages carried the deadlier obstacle of animals. Everywhere we went, there were dogs, puppies, pigs and their suckling piglets, cats and kittens, chickens and a few angry roosters. The dogs in particular seemed to be completely unaware of the traffic, lazing in the middle of the road and forcing the Boss to come to a complete standstill while hooting angrily. It's really important not to actually hit any of these animals, as they are vital for the villagers around here, and a dead animal will bring the owner out from under one of the wooden houses, humbly requesting compensation - the most expensive is a dog, which would cost you somewhere in the region of a teacher's monthly wage - about 1000 ringgits, or approximately £207. I was surprised, because quite often dogs are under-appreciated in poorer regions, but here they are still widely used as hunting dogs, which explains the fattened look of village dogs, in contrast to the pretty poor appearance of town dogs.

We were descending from the heights of Ranau into the lowlands. The scenery varied from one stretch of road to the next, but took in farmland, small-scale vegetable gardens, jungle, secondary forest, and deforested wasteland. Sitting in our air-conditioned Landcruiser, we didn't know it at the time but the temperature was rising, and when we got out at my first school - 3 hours after leaving Ranau - it was into a wall of dense heat.

This area is rural. I really mean it. Rural. There's no electricity, no running water, no internet. You can only get a phone signal at certain points, close to the few towers that exist. There are no tarred roads at all. There aren't even any shops - and I'm not talking about having a local Sainsbury's, I mean that the only things you can buy here are, apparently, bottles of vegetable oil and sweets, from roadside stalls (and even they're few and far between). Petrol or diesel comes from big plastic tanks stored at the side of someone's house, and advertised with a hand-painted sign on the roadside, "Petrol, RM3 only-lah". Houses are almost universally wooden and primitively quaint, although I'm not sure I'd live in one (more on that later...) Some of the posher homes have blue Portaloos outside, others have old, wooden outhouses with rusty corrugated iron doors. Still others have nothing at all, presumably relying on the rivers. People - old, young, women, men - hang around on the verandahs, or beneath their stilted houses, children playing catch or swimming or getting dressed for school. Flimsy fishing nets hang from some of the verandahs, hinting of the hidden rivers rushing through the jungle around us. Once or twice we crossed over one of these rivers, on rickety wooden bridges over gushing white water or lazy brown soup.

Because this area is so inaccessible and underdeveloped, so are its schools. My first school provided board and lodging (at the government's expense) for pupils who aren't able to commute every day. Seventy-five students take this option, about half the student body. All seventy-five live in two gender-segregated rooms of approximately 3m². I estimated that there must be two or three to a bed...

The other schools were in various states of repair and disrepair. One had internet, which the Guru Besar (the headteacher) proudly announced before even giving me his name. Another had one of the new computer rooms the government is building all over the country. No computers, electricity or internet, but the room is there, proudly unlocked and opened for special occasions. Each one had children who were fascinated by us, peering out of windows, asking their teachers who we were, very occasionally saying hello to us - although most were too shy. At my last, there was one little girl who was very taken by us, giving a wide smile every time we looked at her. I assumed she was a very small pre-schooler, and couldn't believe it when the teacher told me she was in his Year 1 class, and was seven years old - she looked about four. All the children there were tiny.

The last stop of the day, besides tiny little girls also yielded the prospect of some houses for rent. One was just across from the school, another five minutes away in a village, and the last about 20 minutes drive. Apparently, Sabahan people expect to drive you to outside the house, point it out, and you just say "Yes, please, I'll take it." So my desire to look around and inspect things was met with a confused stare, as if to say, "Choice? You want choice? You greedy foreigner!" I pushed anyway, and got to see inside one of the houses and at least the outdoor, ground floor section of a second (the one in the village.) Here is a picture of the latter's bathroom:

Horror story, right? Or am I just being greedy?

My actual move from Ranau has been postponed, awaiting a visit from my manager...

Breaking Fast

Today was the first day of Ramadan, which is a little like Lent on steroids. Muslims give up all food and drink (and, like Lent, other things, such as TV or cigarettes) during the day, and only break their fast after sunset - and if they help a less fortunate person to break their fast, then they get double the rewards; charity and humanitarianism is a big part of Ramadan. 

What this means for me is that I have to be a lot more sensitive than I usually am and don't, for instance, say things like "I'd die for a bottle of water right now" to my fasting Language Officer half way through our first day of school visits. Life in Malaysia goes on as normal, despite a third of the population suffering hunger pangs, and becoming dehydrated in the humid heat, although I'm told that the night market will be much busier, feeding the devout after sundown prayers.

This morning I accompanied my colleague and Rapedah (our Language Officer - sort of the go-to person for the District Education Office for the project) to my colleague's set of five schools. They varied a lot, from a beautiful little school on the edge of a hill, which taught mostly Muslim children in little wooden classrooms, to a colonial-style concrete block with wide verandahs, where landscaping was a part of the curriculum. We also visited a resource-rich Chinese school - these schools teach in Mandarin, teaching Bahasa Malay as a secondary language, but as children simply attend their nearest schools, only 10% of students were actually Chinese at this particular school. It's a government requirement, however, that one in five of the schools involved in our project are Chinese schools, which is odd, as Chinese schools only form about 5% of government schools in the country. I won't be teaching at one, as there isn't one in my area. It was interesting to see the schools, although they don't give me much indication of my own schools - mine will be far smaller (in one case, just 75 students in the whole school) and will have next-to-nothing in terms of resources. They won't speak either Chinese or Malay at home, but Dusun, a local tribal language which I will need to pick up at least a few words of to get by, but they will learn three languages in school, making them... what... quadri-lingual? :) Amazing!

Back to reality

What a day! My colleague and I finally checked out of the air-conditioned bubble that is the Hyatt Regency Kinabalu. We were the last two from our induction group left, and our placements are in the same area, so we left together in one of our lease cars, with drivers from the car company. 

As we left Kota Kinabalu, Borneo slowly started to creep into being. The leaves got bigger, so did the flowers. Palm trees sprang into fan-tailed splendour and the glass-fronted, 30-storey apartment blocks crumbled away. The trees sprouted butterflies and tender ferns and little, wooden, stilted cottages crowded over streams. The land started to rise and fall and the rises got bigger until suddenly I looked out the window and realised I was looking at Mount Kinabalu. It is a truly staggeringly big mountain, even when viewed from the side of another mountain, as I did. It's half the size of Everest, but going from sea level to 4000m in such a short distance does wonders for the perception. It loomed. I started to rethink my desire to climb it.

When we arrived at our "hotel" we'd been driving for nearly three hours, and this probably had something to do with my reaction. Or not. I don't know. I do feel I was a little justified in reacting in horror. Faced with a long, partially-painted, partially-peeling bungalow, we walked into what appeared to be a reception area - an enormous room with chairs arranged around the edge and a sort of wood-panelled servery - Zimbabweans should bring to mind any official building from the 1970s they like. Three men and women lay in a state of torpor on the chairs and barely looked up as we entered. The rooms looked as if someone had taken a row of concreted public toilets and tacked on a wooden row of bedrooms behind. Literally, you had to walk through a dark, tiled, and very smelly bathroom to get to the dark, carpeted, very smelly bedroom. A ceiling fan pretended to do its job, while an unidentified scuttling occurred in the vicinity of the cupboard, to which one sad door held on for dear life. Fiona gingerly pulled aside a filthy curtain to look outside. The curtain very un-gingerly fell off, letting a completely unwanted stream of light in. We walked out, got in our car, and drove off in search of something, anything, else.

We found it in a little, out-of-the-way village. As I sit on the long balcony outside my room, fat fruit bats are being clichéd and flitting about in the gathering dusk. The call to prayer has just rung out over the valley (and I can't recall hearing the beautiful and haunting sound once in Kota Kinabalu), and the birds are noisily settling down to sleep. We were greeted by the family who owns the homestay with big smiles, and basic but clean rooms. Okay, so a single en-suite room is £20 rather than £10, but you know, sometimes a smile is worth the premium... :)