An Appeal

I work in some beautiful schools in rural Sabah. The teachers are committed, the children are bright and starry-eyed, the grounds are invariably a wonderland of ponds and flowers and orchids.

There's just one thing that gets me down: the libraries. The libraries - although cared for by the teachers -are full of cheap books that are way above the heads of most of the students, illustrated with dated depictions of life in the 1970s which don't support the actual text, usually falling apart through intensive use and/or the general mould-inducing climate of Borneo. Some schools have a box of books donated by the New Zealand government a couple of decades ago - these would not now be used in New Zealand, and there's no reason my schools should have to settle for lower quality books than those used in our own countries. Some books are so moralistic that they do not encourage reading for pleasure.

So.

I'm asking you to please consider contributing a book or two to one of my schools. I am here for another 6 months, and all books received will be distributed fairly* amongst the five schools I work with. I will also give support to the teachers in using these books, and make sure that they don't end up being cosseted in a box in the librarian's office, and never given to the children - which has happened in the past, when donors demanded that the books be kept in excellent condition (what beloved children's book is ever in an excellent condition?!)

There are a few ways that you can donate books.

1. You can send me a gift certificate for Fishpond, Amazon UK or Better World Books. You can buy gift cards for as little as you like - any amount will help us, even if it's just £1. The certificate codes will be distributed amongst the schools, and teachers will be able to choose high quality books for themselves.
2. You can buy a specific book from Amazon, Book Depository (free delivery to Malaysia), Better World Books, or Thrift Books (or another site of your choice) and request shipping directly to me. Please let me know if you need an address. We have created a wishlist here, although of course you are not restricted to buying only these books!
3. You can buy books in charity shops or bookshops, or through Amazon's second-hand offers, or raid your old and no-longer-used bookshelf, and send them to us - I will provide you with an address, and distribute the books to the schools.
4. If you are interested in supporting local Malaysian writers and illustrators, you can buy books through Silverfish Books - we love anything by Yusof Gajah, Margaret Lim, and Jainal Amambing.

If you would like to buy or donate books directly (rather than buying a gift certificate), please see the list below of authors that would go down well with the ESL learners in my schools. We would love you to put your name inside the front cover, to let schools know who the book was donated by. The children here are fascinated by foreign children - if your children are sending a book, please feel free to include a photo of them reading the book, to give our students a sense of connection to the previous owners. You could also do this if you are a teacher, and your class sends a book.

What do you get back? We guarantee you a warm feeling in your heart! We also promise, if you send us your e-mail address with your donation, to send you some photos of the kids enjoying your books.

Our Desirable Authors (not a complete list!)

• Eric Carle
• Bill Martin, Jr.
• Julia Donaldson
• Yusof Gajah
• Janet & Allen Ahlberg
• Oliver Jeffers
• Nick Sharrett
• Margaret Lim
• Raymond Briggs
• Jill Murphy
• Rod Campbell
• David Wiesner (wordless books)
• Valerie Thomas
• Lucy Cousins (Maisy series)
• Lift the Flap Fairy Tales (Macmillan publishers)
• Books from Macmillan's Children's Readers series
• Any books with simple, repetitive language and bright pictures

Please do not send:

• Books without pictures: very few primary school children are able to read these, in my schools. If you would like to donate these, please let me know and I will provide you with the address of a local high school who would appreciate them.
• Older books with lots of old-fashioned text (we already have plenty of these!)
• Books with pigs as main characters - these are very unpopular, even with non-Muslim children.
• Religious books - for obvious reasons.
• Ladybird books - these are available in Malaysia quite cheaply.

Contacting me

Please e-mail me if you would like to donate.

Or, you could leave a comment below.

*The Power of Reading Programme

One of my schools has already been accepted to the Power of Reading Programme, and won't be receiving any books from this appeal, unless there is a large response (fingers crossed!) You can find out more about the incredible impact this programme is having on schools in Borneo in the video below - this impact is the reason I want the rest of my schools to benefit from floods of great books :)

Reading for Pleasure

When I first arrived in Sabah, it was a month before I realised that any of my schools even had a library. This was partially because some of the teachers were embarrassed to show the library to me, and partially because some schools actually didn't have a library - in one, they had a few books in boxes, and a room without a floor. The lack of a floor was pretty serious, as the building was two metres above the ground.

When I moved to the more urban schools the situation was a little better. They all have libraries, even if the room doubles as a faculty meeting room and the children can't access it outside of their scheduled library class. And they all have books - although those books can sometimes be less than entirely appropriate...  Librarians don't know where to find high quality books, and are preyed upon by visiting salesmen, who push substandard, flimsy books riddled with spelling errors and grammatical bruises. Sometimes, books get donated by foreign governments; these are either culturally insensitive, or, again, substandard fare that wouldn't be given to their own students, but are dumped on Malaysian students because "something is better than nothing." I disagree a fair bit with this statement, but that's another tale.

Anyway - as I've mentioned before, when my schools were offered the chance to apply for a book flood, three of them leapt at the opportunity, and in the end, one of them was chosen, and they have done the most amazing things with their Year 1 to 3 classrooms, trying to engage the children with the new books. Remember this classroom?

 Here's what it looks like now:

It's being used constantly, for storytelling lessons in English, but also for remedial classes, Science, Malay language lessons, Maths games, and just chilling after school. I am continually being amazed by how appreciated the teachers' hard work has been in the four weeks since we finished these reading corners at 10pm on the night before the opening day!

 

Depictions of Violence

The saga in the east of Sabah continues.

Airstrikes have been used on the less-than-200 invaders in a coastal village who formed the backbone of the main siege situation - which seems a little over the top to me. We are receiving daily missives from the government informing us that the situation is under control, although today a Special Security Area was announced, which rather challenges the notion that everything is fine again. A number of Malaysian commentators have noted that "The situation is under control" is just something that's said, you know, in these kinds of situations - like, "Don't worry, you're going to be just fine", or "The cheque's in the mail." It's a matter of form.

In Ranau district - which is about as far as you can get from the Special Security Area without leaving Sabah - tensions have been running high recently. The Royal Army of Sulu is pretty much the only topic of discussion in the canteen.

On Tuesday, near one of my schools, villagers summoned the police, worried about the sudden appearance of a number of Sulu flags, with a sizeable group of Filipino workers in the timber camp nearby being accused of sympathy for the terrorists. The police had to reassure the villagers that the flags weren't Sulu in origin, and  had in fact been put up by an overenthusiastic member of a new political party, as part of the election campaign.

Another day, one of the same Filipino workers asked for a couple of hours of credit at a local vegetable stall, a common enough request in these parts. The stall-owner refused and called the police, accusing the man of trying to steal from him. The policeman, apparently with an eternal well of patience, calmly pointed out that the stallowner still had the vegetables in his possession.

I do feel sorry for Filipinos in Sabah at the moment; the lack of sympathy is astounding. Malaysians are in deep shock at the deaths of eight policemen during the fighting, and are genuinely afraid of what might happen if the 800,000 Filipinos living in Sabah decide to join the cause.

This is not helped by the flood of militant photos and videos on Facebook and the internet. The pictures are violent and scary, showing masked soldiers and guns and prayers being said before battle. 

They get more and more graphic: I have (unwillingly) seen pictures this week of decapitated heads being carried by weeping women; dead bodies with their Philippine Army boots highlighted, and corpses in begging positions, their blackened arms raised above their heads. They are more explicit in their depiction of death than I have seen in Western media, but my colleagues do not seem as fazed as I am. Photos of Malaysian deaths carry doas or prayers written on them; Philippine death photos raise questions with the government, for instance, "Why does this man have a Malaysian ID card? Did you invite him here Mr. Prime Minister?"

But the very worst so far came in the staff room at one of my schools, where, before I realised what I was being invited to see, I was seeing the first two dead policemen being beaten and sliced open and kicked by the Philippine invaders, the whole event being filmed on one of their phones for posterity.

With rallying cries like these, is it any wonder that this national grief and terror is continuing unabated?

Sulu sea piracy

Pirates have landed. I'm not kidding: an army of desperate pirates from the Philippines arrived on the east coast of Sabah a few weeks ago, and have proceeded to engage in a number of standoffs with the police and army.

At the beginning, all we in the interior knew of it was colleagues on the east coast having to drive through several police roadblocks a day. But it's descending into gunfights and deaths, and while the town of Lahad Datu has become a ghost town and our colleagues are staying home, we further inland are also now dealing with roadblock after roadblock. Each car must be stopped, and each driver and passenger scrutinised. Suspicious cars are pulled over and papers examined. And god help you if you happen to be Filipino.

Now, the story itself is rather romantic, in the historical sense rather than the love sense. The invaders call themselves the "Army of Sulu" and they are led by the brother of the Sultan of Sulu. A couple of centuries ago, the whole of northern Sabah was given to the Sultan of Sulu by the Sultan of Brunei - because that's what monarchs do, they give each other huge swathes of land and dominion over the people who live there (the Sultan of Brunei also gave most of Sarawak away - to the white rajah, James Brooke. But that's another story.)

Later on, the Sultan of Sulu came to an agreement with the British North Borneo Company, leasing the land in perpetuity on payment of a yearly rent.

So far so good.

Then came the Second World War. Poor little Sabah got bombed twice, once by each side, and then afterwards, the Company bankrupt, it got handed over to the British government. The British government later granted independence to the Straits colonies, which became the Malayan Union, and then, in the 1960s, Sabah, along with Singapore and Sarawak, decided to join Malaya, and form the Federation of Malaysia.

The problem is that the Sultan of Sulu leased the land to the British North Borneo Company, not to the government of Malaysia, and although Malaysia still pays the rent each year, the Army of Sulu is keen to remind everyone that Sabah still belongs to the Sultanate of Sulu - and therefore, in modern terms, to the Philippines.

You see the problem?

An additional issue of course is that it's election year. On the one hand, the government doesn't want to be embarrassed, while on the other hand, it's been mooted that the invasion has been especially engineered in order to allow the government to show Sabahans that they need them - Sabah is currently not a safe win for the ruling party, and we've been seeing a lot of politicians lately, handing out cash to poor families and students and generally showing Sabahans that they're a good bunch, really, why vote us out now?

And while the endless roadblocks are an annoyance, should the Malaysian government not come to some kind of peaceful resolution that will avoid incensing the nearly one million Filipinos in Sabah, we may be looking at more serious disruptions to deal with in the weeks to come.