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!