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.