:: One People, Many Cultures ::



::Living Together in Respect and Friendship::

Last Saturday I was lucky enough to get to the free concert by A.R.Rahman, put on as part of the Sydney Festival. For those of us who don’t recognise the name, Rahman wrote the soundtrack to Slumdog Millionaire.

Although he’s been booked to perform for a long time, the recent tension between India and Australia over violence in Australian universities gave him more reason to come. He says that the Indian media behaved irresponsibly by blaming a stabbing last year on racism when it was more likely to be drug related.

Whether the attacks are race or drug related, it was great to be part of a huge, multicultural crowd watching the 40 performers singing and dancing for peace.

As of this year, NSW will have 4 bilingual schools where lessons are to be given in both English and an Asian language. I spoke to the principal of Scotts Head Public School , which specialises in Indonesian and found out that all new students will be taught the normal curriculum in Bahasa for at least 1.5 hours per day. They’ll also offer language lessons by videoconference to nearby schools where Indonesian isn’t offered. And to further improve the language skills of their students, they’re planning to set up a wiki with their sister school in Lombok.

Being a Muslim country, or a mixed religion country with a large number of Muslims, many women in Borneo wear headdresses in public. Interestingly, I saw a number young women in high heels, tight pants, tight tops and push-up bras wearing the headdress too. I wonder if this means that Malaysian men are more distracted by hair than other parts of the female form.

The highlight of my whole trip was spending new years eve with a local family in the capital of Brunei. I was sharing a hostel room in the youth centre with a Japanese man who was travelling outside Japan for the first time. He’d brought his badminton racquet and befriended a local man on the badminton courts at the youth centre, securing an invitation to dinner on new years eve. The family was kind enough to extend the invitation to me.

Our host had a wife and three children at home. His brother brought a wife and two more children. His sister brought more, and his parents were there too. Add a Muslim Murabi and it was a very full house.

Each of the children were confident and comfortable with who they were, laughing at themselves and teasing each other and showed a lot of interest in Shinya and me. The adults were also very curious and welcoming. I got the feeling that they were all as excited to have us there as I was to be with them.

Before dinner, the Murabi lead a prayer to thank Allah for the year that we’d had and to bless each of us and to request a good year ahead. He specifically named each person in the prayer, using a list he’d been given by the host, including ours. This Murabi had apparently been invited because he was known to the family, but they could have invited any, giving him a donation in an envelope to thank him for his time. This ceremony was not traditional for New Years Eve. Our host did it before trips or major events, but thought that it was a good chance to celebrate and I’m glad I was around for it.

After a delicious dinner, the kids put me through a ‘mental age’ test on their PSP (it’s 57 if you must know) and we filled in the time sharing facebook accounts and chatting about the culture until midnight.

Aisha, the youngest daughter had convinced her father to buy her a firecracker every time they went shopping together during the year so she had a big stack especially for the occasion. They were our old favourites – ball shooters, sparklers, bumble bees, chinese flapjacks(?) – but the first one to be let off was called ‘mini dynamite’. Even with the warning I was unprepared for the force of the explosion at 10 metres away. Any closer, our host said, and it would have smashed his windows.

It was almost 2am before we left, with the whole family coming out to see us off, celebrity style. I got on the bus back to Malaysia early the next morning, still tired, but on a high from a wonderful night with a beautiful family. This is what travel is all about.

If I have any complaint about Brunei, it’s around the tours. There used to be a government funded tourist information counter in the post office, but that closed down and now one of the tour companies provides information ‘free of charge’. Of course, that information includes details of the tours they offer themselves. I don’t know how tourists would find the other tour companies unless they take some time to wonder town or guidebooks happen to mention them.

I took a tour that had been discounted to less than half the original cost because I tagged along with a Dutch family of 9 who had already booked. The guide, Zizi, was very friendly and knowledgeable and the boatman had incredible eye-sight, so I got my money’s worth, but if Brunei wants to build the ecotourism industry to replace the oil exports when they run out, they need to create better value.

As it was, I saw more in three hours than others see in 1 hour at almost the same price and it was worth the money at the discounted price. We took a speed boat down the river, stopping to watch Proboscis monkeys jumping into the water from 3m up, squirrels playing in the tree tops, monitor lizards, herons, igrids and even baby crocodiles with jaws 2 inches long. The boatman was trying to catch one to show us up close, but the guide stayed at the other end of the boat ‘because where the babies are, mothers are not far…’

On our first morning in Kuching (first morning in Borneo, in fact) we saw the headlines of a local newspaper saying that a fire during the night had destroyed 7 shops. A couple of hours later, we followed the smoke column to a row of shops on the river, just beyond the area we’d walked the night before.

A fire truck blocked most of the road, but that didn’t stop onlookers from standing close, checking out the action. Already 10 hours since it began, the firemen were still hosing down the smouldering remains, dodging the onlookers (or shopkeepers?) who were picking through the rubble.