THE CICAK.com

HEROES: ‘I’ is ’saya,’ and ‘name’ is ‘nama’

Photo of Elaine Leong

By EVELYN WONG

“Natai” means death in the Dusun language.

When Elaine Leong, 18, travelled to Kampung Natai – literally, the village of death – in April 2007 to do volunteer work with a Kadazan-Dusun tribe, she must have wondered if she had gotten into more than she bargained for.

Thankfully, Kampung Natai is nothing like its name. A Kadazan-Dusun village situated north of Kota Kinabalu, it can only be reached by four-wheel drive. There, Leong planned to carry out her two-week project with another volunteer, Xiao Wei, working in the village teaching children English and helping in village activities such as gotong-royong (spring cleaning). A lot of hard work and preparation had brought her there, but the best was yet to come.

Like most urban teenagers, Leong, formerly of Catholic High School PJ, had so much more on her mind after SPM to consider besides volunteering.

“Although I did long for the chance to be involved in volunteer work, I didn’t think I had the time or resources to do so,” she says.

So when the opportunity came up with an offer from a charitable organisation, she jumped at it.

“Better to regret going than not going,” was her thinking, she said.

Determined, Leong threw herself into the daunting but inevitable task of raising funds for her project. Armed with a list of corporations, she painstakingly created acrylic paintings with the message “Thank you for putting smiles on faces” to send with her letter of appeal to more than a hundred companies. Sadly, rejections seemed to be the norm rather than the exception.

“It was pretty discouraging at times,” Leong admits. “Some companies gave me false hopes when they showed interest but then did not reply again. Once I even received a very rude phone call…”

Nevertheless, Leong persevered and was rewarded. Two employees from HSBC Bank and IDC respectively were touched enough to make personal donations for Leong’s cause. AirAsia also supported her by providing funds as well as a free plane ticket to Sabah.

In Kampung Natai, Leong and Xiao Wei taught English to local children and adults. Here, Leong’s creativity came to the fore once again.

“Elaine loved cracking jokes during the adult class … she was very creative in teaching the children. She thought of all sorts of different activities to make the classes interesting,” Xiao Wei recalls.

They divided the children into different groups: “The older ones would learn sentence structure and grammar. Those just entering primary would learn basic words; those yet to enter school would learn the ABCs or just draw. For the younger ones, they would draw something and I would tell them the English word for it,” explains Leong.

They had fun with the children, buying eggs for them to paint at Easter. “I think they most enjoyed eating the hard-boiled eggs afterwards, though! It’s a rare treat for them.”

One of the eye-openers of the project was getting involved in the village’s Open Day. Leong and Xiao Wei planned events, did publicity via signboards and flyers, manned counters and helped raise funds, but mostly they soaked in the sights and sounds of the novel experience.

Like any proper celebration, there was food (the men slaughtered chickens and caught fish while the women cooked the spoils), music (traditional gong-playing), and games (blow-pipe, spear-throwing, a race on bamboo stilts, slingshot and many more). Leong had the opportunity to interact with the villagers as well as witness firsthand a “foreign,” yet local way of life. Staying with a villager’s family showed Leong what life was like in a ethnic tribal village far from town: bare of the material possessions most urban folk deem necessary to survival, yet plentiful in natural resources and beauty.

Reflecting on this, Leong believes “there’s this huge gap between the ethnic tribes in East Malaysia compared to West Malaysia. When I came back, I had to tell all my friends about my trip, what I learned about their culture and way of life. That’s the reason I set up a web page and a movie documenting my experiences. Through these, they could really feel like they were in the village, like I was bringing the village to them.”

“I guess to many of my friends now, Kadazan-Dusun doesn’t seem like such a foreign culture anymore,” she laughs. “It’s ironic that in a multicultural nation like Malaysia, we still don’t know each other very well. It’s one way to connect, albeit a small one.”

Her friend Jeanette Chang agrees. “After the project, I think the most significant change that I’ve seen in Elaine would be her outlook on friendship, that it is possible to form eternal friendships with people of different worlds,” she says. “Even though she and the people there were separated by differences of culture, language and lifestyle, it was possible for her to forge friendships and bond with them.”

For most people, that would have been the end of it. However, Leong became committed to this cause and decided to visit the village for another two weeks again in June 2007 –self-funded, self-organised and on her own.

After the familiar procedure of contacting sponsors, securing a ticket, and convincing two very worried parents that their precious daughter would be perfectly safe by herself, she set off again for Sabah.

When asked about the work she has done among the villagers of Kampung Natai, Leong is realistic.

“My project is actually a very miniscule one. But I also feel that whatever you do, no matter how small, has an effect. So maybe I didn’t teach the kids Shakespeare, but at least they now know how to introduce themselves, say simple words in English,” she says. “My only regret is that I could not teach them more in such a short while.

“In the newspapers, I had always read about the low standard of English in rural areas, but I had not imagined it to be this serious. A fair number of the younger children are illiterate, and rely mainly on memorising simple English phrases without actually understand what it means,” she continues. “I would love to give each of them individual attention and to explain that ‘I’ is saya and ‘name’ is nama. I would love to teach some of the older kids to read Roald Dahl, to open them up to a world of imagination and wonder - perhaps I will do so should I ever go back again.”

Regarding what still needs to be done about to improve the quality of life among the tribal people of East Malaysia, she says, “They need better roads, but more important, dedicated and knowledgeable teachers. I found out that the adults in the village drink a lot of lihing (homemade rice wine); some seem quite alcoholic and it saddens me that their children will have to grow up in that vicious cycle. However, I can’t just burn all that alcohol on whim, can I? So things are not so simple. Hopefully, some of these children will be able to break free of it. One important means to that end is education.”

You may say that it’s just a novel way to spend one’s holidays before jetsetting abroad. Or you can look at it as a sign that, as a generation, young people are becoming increasingly socially aware and looking for opportunities to make a difference in our community, our world.

Leong made a remarkable journey beginning with just a seed of determination, lots of printer ink, paper and crayons. I think we’d all agree that she has surpassed her goal of doing charity work “beyond posing in pictures for Moral projects,” and in doing so, realised that when you give to others, you gain much, much more yourself.

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Subject: Heroes - Evelyn Wong/Elaine Leong.