THE MALAYA WAY

RURAL HOME

Going to the Doctor here is a very different experience. Try this in America. Call your doctor on his cell,(what? you don't have your doctor's cell phone number?)tell him you need to see him and what will he do??? Here he will schedule you in in the next few hours himself. You wait maybe 10 minutes in the waiting room then go right in. You spend as long as you want with him and then actually be the one to say you better go and let him get to work after about 30 minutes of chatting about your medical thing or whatever. You wait another 2 to 5 minutes then they have your meds ready which you get right there in the office. Total cost about $8.00 (eight),American dollars...meds and office visit. The Doc has the same amount of training as an American doc. Need a 9:00 o'clock pm appointment like I did, no problem the doc works 12 hour days right in his clinic. Now I wouldn't necessarily have surgery here I would go to Singapore for that bu for general medical care? What a deal? We'll see if I die from the treatment. :)

Can't find the following; gallon of milk, original dvds, cheerios or most other cold cereals, fast food, lunch meats, cheese other than processed, micro-wave popcorn, big box stores, department stores, green rivers and on and on.

Never see full size pickups or other large cars, do see alot of very small cars and very small scooters-motorbikes. We do see Nissan, Honda, Toyota, Kia, and locally made cars.

Usually takes 4 or 5 trips to get things done in town. You have to go to several places to buy things.

This is an emerging society. It is the "old west" of the world. One only has to travel a few hours into the jungle to be where people have never left the jungle and it is not always the safest place to be. Head-hunting was carried out as late as the 60's. The Ibans and other Dayaks (native tribes) have only come out into society here in the last 20 years or so. Most all adults were born in the longhouses in the jungle and most all go back to their native longhouses for all holidays and most still have their own rooms there.

BATU 18 SCHOOL CHILDREN

The schools are still wrestling with how much to emerge their children in English. Schools started out 30 or so years ago with the entire curriculum in English and the changed to 1/2 and now may go back. English is their key to a better life as all higher learning is in English. We are working with a rural school that is about 45 minutes out of town. We will try to get them more library books in English. The teachers and students have nice schools or the best they can afford but very little in the way of books.

The closest towns are 3 hours away. There are no suburbs. Well I guess really there are...they are the longhouses. We will be visiting soon and will send a few pics. The people are very loving and kind and happy. They have so little but have very little to worry about too.

At our district meeting today we treated the elders to an American meal of potatoes and gravy and fried chicken. Boy you should have seen them go down on that meal. I have never seen anybody eat as many spuds as they did. Well, maybe Jason, Matt, and Lynn did.

I have been a little under the weather so work as slowed a little but I am up and at it again so watch out. We have the big Gawai celebration with native dancing this weekend and a baptism before that and a few other NGO's to meet with. So the work goes on.

Ellen talking now---We have done a little exploring this last week. We trusted our car to make a trip south to Tatau. It is actually smaller that Bintulu. Next time we will head north toward Miri. We will be traveling to Miri in June for our district conference. I still use GoogleEarth as my map. I have discovered that there are some pretty good photos of this area on that web site. Click on the little blue squares to see the photos. Check out Sungai Plan which is just north up Hwy 1 from here. That is where most of our branch members live; where we visit them. That is where our church building is located. We will have to take some photos of our building and post them.

One thing Bill neglected to mention that they do differently here is eat on the floor. They 'set the table' by placing the tray of mugs, the stack of plates or bowls, a pan with spoons on the floor (which is spotless, by the way). Then they bring in the dishes of food. Everyone is sitting on the floor or on chairs. One person (the hostess) dishes up the food for each person and hands the plates out, then the spoons, then the beverage (usually what they call 'kordial' which is a fruit drink made from a concentrate mixed with water, warm water, or at least tepid) never chilled because there is no room in their refrigerators and tap water is tepid to warm in temperature. Often we are served what we call 'chopped' chicken which is chicken that has been chopped up with a meat cleaver. They take the chicken, plucked, cleaned out, and start chopping to get bite-size pieces and they cook the pieces. So 'chopped' chicken always has bones, skin, fat, and don't look too closely. It tastes really good. As people eat they spit out the bones and put them on the floor. After the meal they wipe up the floor.

We've also eaten some green vegetables that look like fern heads cooked with garlic---yum, so good. We've eaten other green veggies that we don't recognize at all. All meals have rice in some form; either noodles or just plain rice. Last night we had Iban rice which was slightly purple in color.

One home we visited in had little children, one and about four years old. The mother fed them from her plate using her own spoon for the children. Saves dishes. Made me wonder if the 4year old could feed herself.

PRES AND SISTER SKELTON, OUR FIRST MISSION PRESIDENT AND WIFE

A FAMILY WE WORKED WITH TO HELP THEM 

COME BACK TO CHURCH