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 :)

End of Year

 So we've finally come to the end of the school year in Malaysia. The last few weeks have been a constant struggle to find and speak to teachers, who have been busy with a pile of administrative tasks. Although the aim is not to take teachers out of class, in reality there is very little teaching time in the last month, as there is no real administrative staff in schools. Teachers have to write, record, and submit reports on each child, take in and report on textbooks, complete data on assessments and progress online, make reports to the local, district, state and national offices, and... well... take part in a LOT of ceremonial days. Yes, ceremonies are a large part of the last month; they're a large part of the year, really, but the last month is crazy.

Ceremonies include preschool graduations in which the children wear little hats and red capes, Parent-Teacher Association fishing competitions, singing and drama competitions, Year 6 farewells, teacher appreciation days, prizegivings, and parent report readings.

The other day, I was invited along to a farewell party for Year 6 at one of my schools. Thinking it would be a bit of makan with the kids and their teachers, I wore a skirt and short-sleeved blouse. To their credit, the headmaster and curriculum head didn't bat an eyelid as they told me that since the exam results have been delayed, the party was postponed until late November, and instead, the day would be devoted to entertaining none other than the State Minister for Education, and his wife. I batted several eyelids as I cast an eye over my totally inappropriate clothing. I did manage to get out of sitting on the VIP couches at the front of the hall with the Minister and his entourage, as we listened to a wee little thing belt out that song about living your dreams and aiming higher. You know the one.

But later on I was called up to the stage for photographs, which rather amusingly ended up being me in short sleeves with around 20 men. Well, not that amusingly...

Then at the end, the headmaster, who is a lovely man, called on me to come back to the stage to receive a gift in thanks for the year, and it was only when I returned to my seat next to my teacher that I realised that this was my new baju kurung.

Baju kurung is the uniform of Malaysian women. All teachers have to wear it in school, although I have seen a few daring women in skirts and blouses lately. It consists of a knee-length, long-sleeved blouse worn over a "sarong" skirt. It's grown on me. When I first arrived I swore that nobody, but nobody, was getting me into what is basically a bright purple (/orange/yellow/other luminous unmatched patterned material) sack, covering as much as it can without putting a paper bag on one's head.

Now, I looked at my present, and said, "What a pretty combination of blue stripes and purple swirls." It has a neckline of large plastic beads. I did tell my teacher that they weren't getting me into the traditional high heels as well, but I'm not so sure anymore that I will be finishing my contract without owning at least one set...

So off I went into the office to get changed, and when I came out, the Minister and his wife congratulated me with big smiles on how pretty I had suddenly become. The teachers all exclaimed and smiled and patted me on the back, and I smiled back and realised that this moment should have come several months ago. Their pleasure shamed me!

After makan, I had to pop into another school where the teachers were having a meeting, and I actually got a round of applause when I walked in.

Unfortunately, although I was asked to pose for photos with every single person at both schools, I didn't take one myself, so you will have to wait until the new year for a photograph of me in my lovely new uniform. 

For now, school is over, my meetings with my Project colleagues are done, the cats are settled and I have found someone to feed and cuddle them while I'm gone. Tomorrow, I fly home to Zimbabwe, and sadza, and Castle beers, and Amarula in morning coffee, and my family and friends, and I cannot wait!

There are books... and there are Books.

We did a library audit this week at the school which will be getting the book flood, SK Poring. I just wanted to share with you some of the gems the children can currently look forward to reading.

The Power of Reading

Each of my five schools has a library. For 3 of the schools, that's about as much as can be said for them. There is a room that's called a library, which contains some books. It's nothing like the sacred place that was the Harare Municipal Library for me growing up. There are books, but because the children have mostly never seen a book before arriving at school, they are stuffed onto shelves in whatever way was most convenient for the student before he raced off to class. There are books, but they are falling apart. There are books, which were written in Kuala Lumpur for kids with the benefit of a private English-medium education, or which were donated by the New Zealand government in 1975, when their schoolkids thought they were outdated. There are dense, yellowing, moralist tales. There are books. And yet there aren't.

There are not books that the children want to read over and over again - there's no Hungry Caterpillar, or Brown Bear, or even the beautifully illustrated fairytales written by local authors that I bought on my trip to Kuala Lumpur. There are no bright pictures that help non-English speakers to understand the text. There's no understanding of what a seven-year-old or ten-year-old child looks for in a storybook.

And this is a shame, because what I see every morning is little ones dumping their bags in the classroom and rushing off to the library for the twenty-minute open reading session. It seems to stop by Year 3, but the older ones peek over my shoulder at whatever book I open up in school, or at my Kindle, and murmur the words to themselves. There is still this fascination with books, even without having the literature-rich background I was lucky enough to be born into. 

What the libraries do have is luminous walls.

Malinsau Primary School Library

In Malinsau, the library is brand new - when I arrived last year, it was locked to students because it was unsafe, but the librarian has done wonders with a spot of purple paint and some polystyrene letters. He's made it as welcoming as he can with the limited funds he has access to, but there's only so far it can stretch; the one bookshelf has been filled with every book he can find, and a few teachers' guides, and it's still not enough for the children.

But all this is about to change. Last week I was frantically busy with three proposals, one for each of the three schools with the least library resources. The British Council is funding just 15 schools in the Project in Sabah through a Power of Reading programme - basically a book flood, in which the school is 'flooded' with up to a thousand high quality storybooks aimed at the first three years of primary school. It's been very successful in raising literacy levels in rural schools all over the world, including South Africa, so there are very high hopes for this neglected corner of Malaysia, particularly my little cluster of schools, where only one in twenty students passed their final Year 6 national English exams last year.

I've had to guide all my mentees, headteachers, librarians, remedial teachers, and District Language Officer through statements of support, in-depth discussions, photography, mind-mapping, planning and even building - whatever it takes to get onto that list of 15 schools. In one school, we started building reading corners in the classrooms; after the initial discussion in which I described the project to the teachers and headmaster, the lovely head went off, called the caretaker with his machete, and disappeared into the bush at the back of the school to harvest some bamboo. They were hard at work building the first structure that very afternoon. 

The caretaker checks on his child-friendly tools.

The Year 3 students try on the frame for size.

Nearly done.

I had a laugh with the GB and caretaker about his machete, kept constantly at his side in a handmade wooden sheath. In Europe he'd be arrested for putting children in danger; in Sabah, kids are taught how to wield machetes safely from toddlerhood, a necessity for a life in which they are likely to need that awareness.

So yes, basically we did what needed to be done. 15 places for Sabah, from 300 schools on my Project - not an easy task. The proposals are in, and now all that we can do is wait to see what the board and the State Education Office say. I'm crossing all my fingers and toes, and so are some very excited little girls and boys. And now I hope you're crossing yours too :)

Luang Prabang the Second

Luang Prabang is an odd town. Sometimes you can feel that there's nothing in it but tourists and people working for tourists. But then you wander a little, and you get off (gasp!) the Sisavangvong Road, and you stumble on a street full of Laotian boys singing karaoke...

My hotel was quite a way from the main tourist street, and the lane in front of it was occupied not by chic French cafés or backpackers wearing Phuket t-shirts, but by a couple of tiny, dark houses where the inhabitants lived towards the back of a large ground floor room and sold essentials from a glass case at the front. To buy a drink, I stood at the door and called inside "Sabaidee! Hello! Sabaidee!" for about five minutes, until the lady heard me from her bed, then came to charge me smiling for the can I already had in my hand.

While my friend did the tourist route for her first time, I simply wandered about the streets, drinking coffee, watching people, and, yes, shopping. I found one tiny shop with a cat on the doorstep and a weaver within, and couldn't resist buying my cousin's birthday present from there.

One day, I dropped into the library.I admit, my main reason was entirely selfish: I was wilting in the 32-degree heat, and there was a little cafe attached to the side of the building. But once I'd downed my cold drink, I got talking to a volunteer at the door who suggested that if I had nothing better to do, I might like to step into their back room, where at that very moment their afternoon conversation club was running. I did indeed have nothing better to do, so I let myself be guided into the room, where around 20 foreigners were chatting to Lao counterparts. I was assigned to a young monk, Phoung, which I was thrilled about. I'm not a religious person, but if I were seeking an answer to life, I think Buddhism would probably be the route I'd choose. Yet I know next to nothing about the lives of the thousands of saffron-clad men who'd populated my train window scenery since southern Thailand. 


Phoung was extremely chatty - perhaps the most driven student of English I've ever met - and so I just let him talk for the next hour about his life in the monastery. Actually a novice, he was just 16, and had come to the monastery in Luang Prabang from his rural village at just 12. So young, I though, but then I know people who went to boarding school at 5, and this seems, in many ways, quite similar to a religious school in the west. He's up at 5am for chanting, then he goes on the walk for morning alms-giving before spending time with an older monk who tutors him in religious and secular matters. Later he does chores - that morning he'd been painting the temple, and then, because it was a full moon, he'd been called to shave the abbot's hair off - he would have his own head shaved later that afternoon. After that it's lunchtime, and then he's free for 2 hours - this is the time everyday when he comes to the library to practise his English with tourists. When that's over, he returns to the temple to carry out religious duties and to wash before the evening chanting. Later in the evening there's time to attend his English course with an American volunteer before bed at 11:30. Replace the chants with mass or chapel, and it's very close to any Christian boarding school in the west. At 18, they are given the choice of taking vows and becoming full monks, or making their way into the world. Phoung wanted to be an IT technician.

After a while, we were all evicted from the library but outside I sat a little longer to chat with the librarian, Phoung and his friend, and a Swiss woman, Jutta, who recently left her job and instead of finding a new one packed up and moved to Laos, intending to start up English classes for women (boy, do I wish I was her.) She's ended up having a lot to do with the temples, though, and knew Phoung well. She invited me to visit one of the temples she works with, explaining on the way that today was a full moon. That meant shaved heads, but also some rather special drumming. We sat with a novice called Keo just outside a small pavilion on the temple grounds. Other novices came jogging up, some running hands over heads shaved moments ago. They gathered inside the pavilion and one started the beat with the huge, hanging drum. Others joined in at the sides with smaller drums and cymbals. 

The afternoon heat - even at 4pm - meant that every minute or so, sweat streaming off his head, the drumming novice would make eye contact with another novice who would take up the mallet and continue, without missing a beat. It was pretty hypnotic stuff, and before I realised it, 20 minutes had gone by and the novices were slowing down, pausing, stopping for good.

Or at least until the next special day - a full moon, half moon, new moon, old moon, time for blessing... the novice sitting with us said with a laugh, "Many festival days for Buddhists!"

Jutta and I went into the temple next, where, thanks to the full moon again, buckets of water had been brought by villagers to be blessed. The hall was full of women sitting on their heels, soles of their feet carefully pointing away from the golden Buddha statues at the front. The monks came in - not the novices this time - and sat in a semi-circle at the front just before a line of the only four men in the hall. They held a piece of string as they chanted; my eyes naturally followed the string along its course, through the clasped hands of the monks, around the buckets of water, through a small circlet of marigolds, and out through the window, where it was looped around a brand new pick-up and motorbike - obviously two of the men had been doing well recently... The chanting rose and fell, and as I sat on my heels I quickly learnt to do as the other women did, leaning forward and swiftly slipping my feet from side to side. Several times I wasn't fast enough and my feet fell heavily asleep. The chanting was faintly soporific and went on for nearly 90 minutes (to Jutta's surprise, who attends it regularly, despite being an atheist) but the women certainly didn't just sit in reverence; they joined in from time to time, quietly spoke to neighbours, placated children, and came and went from the hall as needed. Towards the end a teenage boy came in on his knees and handed out cups of sweet, icy tamarind juice, and my neighbour, who had been grinning at me and Jutta and setting us right when our hands drooped or we didn't move in time, forced one into my hands, saying "You welcome! Drink!" The men started to pass forward gifts to the monks - banana leaves wrapped into cones and decorated with marigolds and cash. With more novices and monks owning mobile phones, apparently, money is becoming a more welcome gift than the traditional food and clothing. 

Right at the end, a monk gathered together all the buckets of water - they would remain in the temple overnight and during the morning chanting, then the villagers would be taking them home to sprinkle around their houses and thus keep their families safe from spirits a little longer.

Outside the temple I said goodbye to Jutta, but with every intention of seeing her again here before she leaves - each day I spend in this little town makes me love it more. It's terrible that so many people never see past the shiny veneer of tourism; Jutta and I were the only foreigners in the temple, and although there were a few other tourists at the drumming, they didn't hang around, just got up close, took their photos and left. I asked Jutta and Keo what they thought of all these tourists; Jutta told me that they're mostly intensely shy young men, embarrassed by attentive paparazzi. Keo said he'd had tourists at the almsgiving pushing their cameras into the line of monks and using the flash; the day before, a woman had said loudly, "Well, I think they all look like beggars - they don't even have the respect to wear shoes." He told me that he and many others don't like non-Buddhist foreigners to take part in the almsgiving, although discreet photos are okay, and  I promised to pass it on, while flushing at the memory of my last trip to Luang Prabang, when I allowed myself to be easily bullied into offering food. So this is me passing it on: should you ever go to Laos, watch the almsgiving, and enjoy an ancient cultural tradition, but don't treat them like they're in a petting zoo, and there for your entertainment. Okay. Lecture over. Learn from my mistakes.

So the next morning, I was woken at 5:45am as on every other day, by the temple bells. When I lived in Coimbra, Portugal, my house was opposite a Catholic cathedral that tolled the bells early every morning - I have to say, I do kind of prefer the Buddhist version. I blearily came out onto the balcony, and down below me saw the women waiting to offer rice from their traditional baskets. 

Bearing in mind the friendly pleas of the novice, I didn't join the hotel staff who were also making offerings, but I did crouch next to the gate (being careful to keep my head below theirs) and take a few photos. I was rewarded by a big smile from one of the monks (they are the ones with both shoulders covered), and was left feeling slightly less of a sponging tourist! 

It was on my last evening, the night of the full moon drumming, that I went for a walk through the town at 10pm, unable to sleep. Probably because of the 11:30 curfew, there was barely a soul out. The full moon made it all a bit eerie and I was turning back for the hotel, and that was when I passed the street full of karaoke singers. It's a remarkable town, this Luang Prabang of mine.

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.

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!

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.

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!