Footsteps on the Fringe

wandering

A little school in the jungle

by Caro

The kitchen was lit only by the yellow flames from the fireplace. Irene sat on the bamboo floor with her husband Julius, keeping their daughter Jasyla company as she stirred vegetables in a wok with a torch for additional lighting.

I joined them on the floor, trying to play their guitar in the dark. It’s harder than it looks to feel for the strings without looking at them. I made plenty of mistakes but the family didn’t seem to mind.

It was not yet 7pm but it gets dark early in Sabah. The family didn’t turn on their generator, relying on the fireplace for light. A village in the depths of the Crocker Range, Kampung Buayan isn’t linked to the national grid. Its electricity comes from generators or a micro-hydro system if it’s working. It hadn’t worked in months. The teachers’ quarters use solar power.

Irene teaches in the kindergarten in this little village that is her whole world.

irene

Irene and Julius were born here, and so were their parents and grandparents. Not in the exact same spot, of course, as Buayan only came about during her grandparents’ time. The story, she told me, was that its people had once lived further away but their river dried up. No one knew why but they had to search for a new spot. They found this plateau by the Papar river, and called the new village Suayan.

Suayan became Buayan for some administrative reason, not because there are crocodiles there. I asked.

This is my second visit to this small village ringed by mountains. I still like it even though it is now linked to the outside world by an earth road, not just a jungle track.

phones

It’s also linked to the world by the Internet, sometimes. A satellite Internet centre was set up here some years ago, but it hasn’t functioned for some months because the micro-hydro system which powers it, hasn’t been working. There is a patchy telephone service, if the mobile phone is hung in a certain way to catch the signal. Buayan houses can be recognised by the proliferation of phones dangling from nails outside the house, and people talking into their dangling phones without touching them, for fear that the line would be cut off.

Irene’s Buayan was different, of course. Over the two days that we stayed in her house, she told me a little of her story. It was an idyllic life, growing up in an isolated village. Life was quiet, and she settled down to a cosy family life after she married Julius and had four children.

altar

Julius built the big house that they live in, with plenty of space for guests upstairs. The family lives downstairs. They are devout Catholics and keep two prayer altars in the house, in a curious blending of their deep Christian faith with the distinctly non-Christian tradition of keeping altars.

I like the cosy house, except when I woke at 230am and needed to use the toilet about 10 metres away. The village was in darkness, and it took all my courage to walk outside the house, lit by the moon and a torch, to the toilet. I considered waking my friend Roy but I could hear him snoring peacefully in the room next door.

When I got back to KL, I recounted this story to my friend Esther who asked, in all seriousness, if I was scared of snakes. “Ghosts,” I replied, in all seriousness. She snorted with laughter: “Ghosts?!” Harrumph.

Still, I took comfort from the picture of Jesus on the altar when I got back.

kindie

Irene became a teacher when an NGO set up a kindergarten here (photo above) some years ago. She left the village for a year, children in tow, to undergo training in the city.

dona2

Not many kids go to kindie here. Only three showed up on the first day of school when I joined them. One of them was the shy four-year-old Dona who had walked an hour from Kampung Tiku with her sisters. She stood quietly in her pretty red dress damp from the dew, but soon warmed up with the other two children. They pounced on the few toys there, and before long, the kids forgot the adults who hovered around.

But over at the primary school, there were no parents hovering. The children are regarded as independent by Standard One. After all, those who live in Kampung Tiku have to walk an hour through the jungle everyday to the school in Buayan. Those who come from Timpayasa, which is a two-hour walk away, live in the village with their relatives.

They move to the city for secondary schooling.

There are 38 children this year in the primary school, and seven teachers. All the teachers are from Sabah except one from Johor – a young man on his first posting. Joseph still looked a bit shell-shocked at being sent to this remote school, and was not entirely convinced when we tried to assure him that he would look back at this time with fondness. Still, he was a cheerful man who seemed to have a kind heart.

school

The teachers’ quarters are literally a stone’s throw from the lovely schoolhouse on stilts. There’s so much personality in this building made of recycled wood and painted with cheerful murals. Even Dolly Parton provided an inspirational quote for the wall: ‘The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you’ve got to put up with the rain.”

School here is more casual than city schools, as the teachers combine classes if they need to or even take in kindie kids when Irene has to go to town. The teachers give voluntary tuition in their spare time, and often have the children staying over at their house. During holidays, the teachers take them out to town.

There is a real bond between the teachers and kids that is rare to find.

For all its limitations because of its remote location and lack of resources, it is a nice school. Buayan is a lovely place.

Buayan : part two (part one here)

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2 Responses to “A little school in the jungle”

  1. gosh, an internet connection that’s been disrupted for months! that definitely sounds like a third-world problem!

    • Caro says:

      I get stressed when I’m in the city and the Internet is down, but I don’t miss the Internet at all when I’m in the kampung! It feels like a different world out there

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    Footsteps on the Fringe

    wandering

    A little village in the jungle

    by Caro

    I could only watch as my feet slid on the mossy rocks, and sent me tumbling into the Papar river. Oswald, our guide, stifled a giggle: “Jaga, ia licin”.

    That warning was a tad too late, and he hauled me up ungracefully.

    Squelching in my soaked adidas kampong while he tripped along lightly in his stylish brown shoes, we continued along a narrow jungle path which I could barely make out in the dim greenish light filtering through the trees packed densely together.

    I walked in front, going by the theory that leeches won’t have time to get their act together to jump on me after their radar detect our presence. I’m not sure about that but I didn’t get a single bite while Oswald picked up two. Of course, I was also wearing leech socks, much to mirth of all. The puffy socks do look like the costume of a court jester but hey, it works.

    We had been walking for an hour by then, with another 3.5 hours to go before we would reach Kampong Buayan.

    Kg Buayan is one of the 10 jungle villages along the ‘Salt Trail’ in the Crocker Range of Sabah, which can only be reached on foot. It’s built on an undulating plateau, amidst the greenest hills that form a ring around it and under the biggest skies.

    We were going there because my former colleague Roy persuaded me to. Or as he remembers it, it was I who persuaded him to. Whichever it is, I’m glad we went. It’s a whole different world from Kota Kinabalu which we left just hours ago.

    Our journey started with a river crossing, followed by a short walk along a logging road before crossing a swaying suspension bridge that led us to the edge of the jungle. There were numerous river crossings and bridges along the way but the jungle walk wasn’t too hard even though the path is narrow and winds around trees, and goes up and down a lot.

    There was only one freakishly steep hill where we huffed up for half an hour, before descending on a very narrow path that ran alongside a deep ravine. There’s no handhold as the path is lined by mossy boulders, and there’s often just enough space for half a footstep at a time. I inched down like a snail, and was utterly grateful to reach the bottom intact.

    Four and half hours after we started walking, we reached Kg Buayan. I was overjoyed because I was exhausted but also because it is beautiful. And it was about to pour.

    The sky was heavy with dark clouds as we climbed the last hill to the village, and the rain started to come down in blinding sheets soon after. We hurriedly made tracks for the pretty blue kampong house where we stayed the night.

    After an icy-cold shower and a change of clothes, I sat down with a coffee on the bamboo floor in the cosy kitchen lit by a flickering wood fire. The fire was down to its last embers but danced to life when Angela, the lady of the house, poked the firewood around to cook our dinner.

    The rain was still pouring down, and we couldn’t go anywhere.

    Oswald told me a little about his life growing up in Kg Tiku, a two-hour walk away from Kg Buayan. He is now 21.

    These villages sound like an amazing place to grow up. Barely a few feet beyond the last few houses, the jungle begins and will not end for miles and miles. Their only access to the outside world is via the ‘Salt Trail’ which people of old used to get to the tamu to exchange their produce for salt and other items.

    Kg Tiku is still pretty much what it used to be but Kg Buayan is now a little more modern. The Internet has arrived, thanks to a rural ICT project set up by Unimas two years ago, while electricity supply comes from a micro-hydro system and solar panels. But phone reception is patchy, at best.

    Self-sufficiency is still their ethos. Every item in the village has to be handmade like furniture or houses, or carried in on foot, or hunted like the mousedeer we had for dinner, or gathered like the jungle vegetables also for dinner. Piglets and chickens run free about the village of 500 people, mostly Dusun farmers who plant rice, pineapple and rubber on the hillslopes.

    The Dusun are the largest indigenous community in Sabah, and are closely related to the Kadazan.

    I was curious about how their lives might have changed with the Internet. Oswald says he doesn’t use email a lot but is keen on facebook.

    The next morning, the sun was shining so splendidly that I made everyone gobble down their breakfast so we could visit the school. Saying goodbye to Angela and her husband Alex, we stopped by to see the 39 children taking their exams in the community hall as their schoolhouse is being rebuilt.

    The school is in a lovely setting in a field that doubles as a helipad for VIPs. Helicopters are also used to fly in large items like glass for the house windows, and to fly out villagers in case of medical emergencies.

    I met a little girl who was flown out after she became ill with dengue, and walked back home when she was discharged from hospital.

    We said hello to the teachers and smiled at the kids who giggled back.

    It’s such a different world here, in one of the remotest corners of Sabah. And it’s left me with a hankering to come back for a longer stay.

    A dream for another day.

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      Footsteps on the Fringe

      wandering

      A road leads here

      by Caro

      There never used to be a road to Kampung Buayan, one of the nine villages along the famed Salt Trail of the Crocker Range in Sabah. The people only had a jungle track that took them over hills and across rivers.

      buayan

      But a road arrived here in November.

      It didn’t arrive with fanfare, rather it crept up onto this Dusun village in a slow crawl. When my friend Roy and I visited a year ago, there was already an earth road that ended near a sulap (hut) belonging to former school teacher Michael. That was where the villagers would catch their ride as a 4WD can reach this point most of the time. From here to Buayan, it would be a two-hour walk for the local people, and a three-hour one for me.

      On that last trip a year ago, though, we had to start walking from much further away as the river was too high for the car to go across to the sulap. That added another hour to our walk – and all in all, we took over four hours to get to Buayan.

      This time, a year later, we could have made it all the way to Buayan in a car although there was a point when we thought we could not. The road is newly carved out of the hillslope, and becomes a sticky mudtrap in the rain.

      stuck

      Still, we were making good time until we came across a 4WD stuck in the mud. It couldn’t go forward or backwards, and blocked our path as well. As it goes in these remote parts, the men of our car and the stuck car had a brief chat before they brought out the cables and hooked them to the cars. Our car reversed with a mighty roar, and pulled the other car from the grip of the mud. It took about half an hour to move the car to one side, giving us enough room to get past. The other car didn’t have proper tyres so it should have returned to town but we later realised that it tried to go on. On our way out two days later, we saw it abandoned by the roadside. I guess it must have got stuck and pulled out again, and decided not to try its luck again.

      We didn’t go all the way by car to Buayan though, as Roy had interviews to do in Kampung Tiku. The car dropped us off there, and it was a short walk through the rice terraces to the house of Gilong, a farmer with nine children. He was chilling in an open space in front of his house, with his children enjoying the last day of freedom before school reopens the next day. Roland, who would be starting kindergarten, was fast asleep in a corner while his older brother scaled a tree to pluck us fresh langsat. His sisters were shy and peeped at us from inside the house.

      kids

      Gilong is an unassuming man with a robust entrepreneurial spirit. He tills a padi field which provides the family with enough rice for the whole year from its once-a-year harvest, and also owns a small rice mill. They have a well-kept sulap where they run a small store and warong on the weekends. Life is still back-breaking, though, as they do everything for themselves.

      The lack of a cash economy makes life tough, and it always shocks me to hear that they cannot afford the things that we throw away because it’s so cheap. Sugar, for one.

      “Oh no, not sugar. Sugar is too expensive,” Gilong said as he was listing out the items that they buy from town. Salt, cooking oil, gas, petrol – things like that. But not sugar.

      I asked about the new road. He looked blank for a moment, and then said they have not used it because they do not have a car or motorcycle. It’s expensive to get a seat in the 4WDs which ply the route – about RM30 one way.

      It’s also too expensive, he said, to use road transport to send their goods for sale in town. The villagers still prefer to float their rubber sheets on a raft down the Papar river to a jetty for collection.

      The road, which will be extended 15km to the last village of Long Kongungan this year, is no magic bullet although it’s undoubtedly useful. As we left Kampung Tiku to walk to Buayan, we too did not use the new road. It would have been too hot, having no shade. Like the rest of the villagers, we used the old jungle track shaded by dense trees.

      mona

      The walk is about an hour. About 17 schoolchildren from Kampung Tiku still use the jungle trail for their school run every morning, setting out about 630am.

      The road is still novel enough for the villagers to talk about it. People still ooh and ahh when a mud-splattered car arrives.

      “She arrived all the way here in a car!” Irene, the kindergarten teacher, told us with a beam as she hugged her eldest daughter who had returned after finishing her training as a nurse in the city.

      Even I, a visitor, had to wrap my head around the idea of cars in Buayan. In my head, Buayan is still the pristine quiet village in the middle of the jungle. And so, it startled me when we first arrived to see two cars parked outside the teachers’ houses.

      car

      The newest teacher, Joseph from Johor, told us he has been able to use the road since he was posted here at the end of last year. It might otherwise have been even more difficult for this city boy to adjust. The teachers seem happy that it’s easier to travel to Kota Kinabalu where they spend their weekends.

      But cikgu Mona, who has been here three years, had mixed feelings.

      “It doesn’t feel like Buayan anymore,” she said. Though a city girl, she requested a posting here because she liked its remoteness and relished the weekly jungle walks to the car pickup point.

      I know what she meant. Its inaccessibility had given Buayan a magical feel.

      Now, instead of creating a life in this village, many people head out for the city lights. The jungle trail is also no longer well-maintained. Irene told us the villagers haven’t had time to organise a gotong-royong this year to clear the path before school started.

      Still, the road is a blessing. The people no longer have to haul gas tanks on their backs home. They have better access to the town’s amenities although it remains prohibitively expensive. But perhaps at some point, they will plant cash crops to sell in town and create a sort of cash economy that is needed for modern survival.

      And it can be a life-saver in times of medical emergencies. We witnessed this first hand when one of our party fell ill. We had planned to stay three days but on the second day, Lano was in severe pain. In the past, he would have to be carried out or a government helicopter summoned but this time, we could call for a car.

      We still had to wait several hours for the car after a text message was successfully sent out. By and by, we spotted bright lights flashing in the far distance like an alien spaceship about to land. It was the car’s headlights in the deep darkness; Buayan has no electricity supply. The lights came closer and closer to us, and stopped in a field behind the house.

      With goodbyes to Irene, her husband Julius and children, we left Buayan and were back in the bright lights of KK in 2 hours.

      As with all things in life, the road is neither all bad nor all good, neither an unmitigated evil nor a full blessing. Everything good brings some loss with it, and everything bad can have something good hidden inside. The road can save lives in emergencies, and it will eventually help the people earn more and make their lives more comfortable.

      But at the same time, something intangible is lost, and this loss is not lost on the people.

      Buayan: part one

      river

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