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