Faces to Names

This is my host mom, Kak Su, holding our neighbor's little girl.
Here Makcik Su [pronounced Mah-chee, meaning "Aunt," but used for any older lady], the grandma, is splitting palm leaves to make cigarette wrappers with Mimi, another neighbor girl.

This is Makcik Lina, the local coordinator for turtles during the nesting season, helping me implant a microchip in this large female painted terrapin.

And here's the terrapin herself--what a champ!

I LOVE this picture of Atikah, my host sister, playing a game like jacks, while neighbor Leisa looks on.

Here Makcik and Pakcik ("uncle" a.k.a. the grandpa) are wholly unmoved by Atizah's extreme displeasure (she does this pretty often).

Unfortunately my camera batteries died right after I took this ONE picture of the wedding reception I attended in the village last week, but this is the throne on the porch where the couple sat to receive gifts and cut the cake (I'm noticing that it is almost impossible to take a picture without getting some random kids in it).

Finally, I saw this GIANT hymenopteran on the nesting beach where the turtles emerge to lay their eggs. Anyone know what it is?

Turtles at last!

January was a really slow month in terms of turtle work, but I have gotten very settled in, am rapidly improving my language skills, and have started volunteering at the primary school in my village teaching English to 5th and 6th graders four days a week, which I love.


Fulbright Fellow Colleen and her family are here from KL visiting Terengganu and they came over to my house for tea with my family. As usual a bunch of the neighbor kids were also around and we got a group picture (above). Colleen and Co. got lucky and came just as turtles have started to show up for the nesting season, so yesterday they were able to come see real live turtles and help release some back into the river after we collected data on them. Several of the girls that I teach, who live near my house, also came along to help me collect the data and release the turtles...


I love the looks Nazirah and the turtle on the left are giving each other in this photo.

A nice little one we measured two days ago...
All seven turtles that I have seen in the past three days have been re-captures from previous years, which is exciting because it means we are getting multiple data sets on the same individuals over time. This allows us to monitor growth and health, and to get a general idea of their movements. However it also suggests that there are probably not many individuals in the population that we have not already captured, which tells us the population is not very large. We have not obtained any eggs from local egg collectors to incubate yet, but I am hopeful that they will start coming in soon. For now, it is great to be seeing lots of turtles at last!

Coconut Pickers

Out of the blue, a couple of mornings ago, the coconut pickers came! I knew it was them as soon as they arrived. I had heard vague mention of monkeys trained to climb coconut trees to harvest the coconuts, and suddenly, there they were: about half a dozen large monkeys tied atop a slat-sided lorry already half-full with coconuts . The monkeys (I think they are some type of Macaque) know how to climb the tall coconut trees, select the older coconuts, pull them off the tree, and drop them to the ground below. A man sits several meters away from the base of each tree holding the leash of the monkey as it works, and looking for all the world like someone fishing in the trees, or flying a very stationary kite. Most of the family and next door neighbors soon assembled on the wakaf * to watch the process. We were all much amused by coconuts that landed with a tinkling smash on discarded glass bottles around the yard, and the grandmother was kept busy trying to entice oblivious goats out from under the trees where the monkeys were working, lest they meet an untimely death by falling coconut.

The handlers give the monkeys directions with what appears to be a mixture of words, shaking of the leash (which rings a bell on the monkey’s collar), and funny chirping sounds. For a good hour these sounds and the steady "Whump!... Whump!... Whump!" of coconuts hitting the ground added to the usual background noise of the kampung—goats, chickens, birds and wind in the trees overhead, and revving motorbike engines. I asked one of the handlers about how they train the monkeys, and what I gathered from his answer was that it is like a school for the monkeys, and it only takes a few weeks to train a monkey to gather coconuts. I was impressed that no humans or goats were damaged by the rain of coconuts, and joined the kids in thoroughly spoiling my dinner with a feast of young coconut flesh once the coconut pickers (and their human handlers) had moved on to the next kampung.

*A wakaf is Malaysia's answer to the American front porch at its best (that is, when the front porch actually functions as a social space). The wakaf is a simple platform about 9 meters square situated a couple of feet off the ground under trees and away from the house so as to remain in the shade and catch any available breezes. (Our wakaf is made of wood, but the government also erects tile ones in public places the way we have picnic tables and benches in parks in the U.S.) Members of the family and various neighbors that happen by seat themselves here in the afternoon to escape the heat indoors and have a chat. In my experience, it attracts a comfy intergenerational mix of anybody looking for company, a change of scenery from the porch or the kitchen, or a good spot do messy projects like opening coconuts, making kites, or splitting palm leaves to make cigarette papers. Kids play on it, chickens and goats run around on it, and because it is simultaneously such a public and familial place, men and women sit on it together with a degree of informality that I have not often experienced in other contexts. I like to join in, reading or knitting (or, today, whittling), and try to decipher as much of the conversation as I can.

Four Month Check-Up

Imagine that you have a budding romantic interest in a person; you are just getting to know each other and all your feelings for this person are new and complicated and unspoken and intuitive and still taking shape. And then SOMEONE asks pointedly, “Well, are you dating?” Your squirmy desire not to answer that question is very like the feeling that has kept this blog dormant for lo these many weeks. I have wanted, for your sakes and my own, to try to pin down my experiences and express them here in hard solid words, but every time I have sat down to do it that squirmy feeling of unreadiness has held me back. Now, after a trip back to the States for Christmas, I have had some time and space to take stock and try to answer the question everyone asks: "How is Malaysia?"

What is Malaysia like?
Quite frankly, what isn’t it like? It is multisensory three dimensional surround sound real life; it is like everything. But if you want specifics, it is charcoal smoke drifting in over the top of my bedroom walls and soaking into all my clothes from where a huge pot of water is being boiled clean in the next room. It is goats and cows and sheep and little children and standing water on the roads. It is the magic of waking up cold on a monsoon morning. It is piecing things together slowly over time because I am never 100% sure that I have interpreted a situation correctly. It is kids jumping rope in the sandy yard, and playing hopscotch. It is going to the malls in KL. It is my impatience at priorities different from my own. It is running the empty beach at sunset (and counting my progress in kilometers). It is the unspeakable discomfort of having relatively but not absolutely large amounts of money. It is the fact that the call to prayer from speakers atop the masjid three houses away now seems utterly unremarkable. It is feeling adolescent as I wonder whether or when to cover my head, and how. It is being hopelessly conspicuous. It is explaining things I do not understand in a language not my mother tongue. It is questioning things that I never thought I would question. And it is normal enough now to permit occasional bouts of boredom.

I wake up one morning to the sound of unusually loud chicken squawks, and later eat fried chicken for lunch, slowly realizing that I had heard my dinner’s dying cries.

We buy my car on Thursday instead of Wednesday because that particular Wednesday is an inauspicious day for big purchases. And then on Friday we get my car blessed by the Imam with lime juice and palm fiber.

While helping me feed turtle hatchlings, my eleven-year-old host sister asks me in English, “Kak Meg, do you like science?” “Yes,” I reply, wondering where this is going. She grins proudly back, “I very very like!”

I whirl around in a market to mouth “I can hear you!” in Malay to the guy in the stall I just passed who shouted out, “White girl! Where?”

During a discussion of holidays, I attempt to explain the story of Easter in Malay to my host mother. At first she thinks I am saying that every American gets dug up from the grave three days after being buried. Luckily I manage to recall the name Muslims use for Jesus, Issa, and am able to clarify—“No, not all people, only Issa. He was dead and then he was not dead.” With a bemused smile and a jolly laugh she replies, “Impossible!” I can only laugh along and wish to know the Malay word for “miracle.”

Some Observations
In comparison to most people in the world, I own a lot of books and spend an unusually large amount of my time reading.

Children everywhere struggle with fractions, decimals, and percents.

I mark the passage of time in very Christian, temperate zone, American ways; in most of the world, Christmas day is hot and unremarkable. Thanksgiving at Angkor Wat certainly was.

In Islam, men can have more than one wife, and that makes me uncomfortable; open mindedness is much more difficult in practice than in theory.

From trying to explain why Americans do things the way we do, I have concluded that, from the outside, the most obvious American values are self-centered individualism and money. Can we work on that?

Assessments and Next Steps
Have I actually "saved" any turtles yet? Well, during my trip to Cambodia we released a Yellow Headed Temple Turtle that was being sold in a market in Phnom Penh into the beautiful Prek Toal Reserve on Lake Tonle Sap. So, that is at least one turtle that I was very directly involved in protecting, but the rest of the work is less clear cut than that. It is long-term protection in the form of education and working with people and trying to protect habitat, so it is harder to count the success in terms of turtles saved.

I think my greater successes so far are in what my fellow Fulbrighters and I have come to refer to as the "Soft Research" aspect of the Fulbright, that is, the context that we bring to our work by living here and staying for ten months instead of popping in to collect data and then scurrying back to the USA to analyze from afar. I am getting a much more complete sense of how things work here, what motivates people, how to work with people, what the long term conservation issues are, and how the turtles fit into all that than I would if I were, say, doing thesis research here for two months over summer break. And, turtles totally aside, every day that I spend here vastly expands my understanding of of how Malaysia, the United States, and I all fit into the world as a whole.

And though that all sounds quite dramatic and important written out, most days feel relatively mundane, and I have not written posts on the days when nothing seemed to be going right. Just like I stopped appreciating every moment of the majesty of the Alaskan mountains or the vibrant tangle of the Panamanian rain forest after a couple of months, I am no longer amazed by every tiny thing here. But the significance of the fact that I have gotten past the stage where everything feels new and amazing is that Malaysia is becoming one of my many homes: a place in the world where I have friends and favorite places and memories and dreams. And when I landed last night I knew the best way to get into the city from the airport, and I understood the announcements on the loudspeaker, and I had a friend's house to stay at instead of a hotel, and I am excited to get back to my house, see familiar faces, and start getting things done again. That is my progress.

When I first moved in with my family in Malaysia, I noticed they had a lot of trees and potted plants around the house, which I, seeing no recognizable fruits, assumed were decorative. But, one by one, each in its season, they reveal themselves to be jackfruit, mango, dragon fruit, turmeric, lemon grass, ginger, sour edible beans, and squash relatives. This is why it is important to stay in a place for months rather than weeks. How many other things in the next six months will humble me by turning out to be more than they first appeared to my untrained eye?

~Meg

Turtle Wrangling: Science, Ethics, and Art

One of the things I do here is collect data on turtles captured accidentally by fishermen in the Setiu river. TCC has an arrangement with Ropi, a young local fisherman, who notifies other fishermen of when we would like to measure turtles. Then, any turtles that they catch, they bring to Ropi and he keeps them until we can come take their measurements. TCC pays him and the fishermen who catch the turtles a little something for their help, and we get mark-recapture data that helps us understand how the population is doing.

Measuring carapace width

Yesterday we went to Setiu to measure terrapins for the second time since I arrived. Each terrapin gets weighed on a scale, has its carapace (top shell) length and width measured with calipers, and gets scanned to determine whether it has a microchip ID tag (if we have already caught it previously). We also inject microchips into any turtle caught for the first time and cut small notches in the edge of its shell that allow us to identify the turtle without a scanner.

With Pelf and a river terrapin

It struck me again yesterday how cool it is that Pelf and I ended up working together before we even knew that we had both spent time at the Wetlands Institute, she as a visiting Asian Scholar in 2008, and I as an intern in 2007. Even though we were not there in the same year, it has meant that we have a set of common experiences, friends, and research skills right off the bat, and I could not be more grateful!

Weighing a little one

As I first discovered during my time at the Wetlands Institute, it is really quite fun to get to hold the turtles and measure them. Wrangling may be a bit over-dramatic as a descriptor, but the bigger ones especially can be quite tricky to work with. Their legs and necks are very strong as they try to flip themselves off the scale and they employ their sharp claws and wide feet to scrape annoying human hands off their shells.

Perhaps I am sentimental and anthropomorphizing too much, but I am sure the turtles do not particularly enjoy being weighed and measured and marked, so I try to remember to wish them good luck when I let them back into the river, and thank them for their contribution to science and the conservation of their species. If nothing else, it is a reminder to me of who I am really working for here, and the responsibility that we all have to help take care of creatures on the brink of extinction. I hope they understand, and I do hope and believe that the suffering they endure is worth it in the end. Each turtle who withstands the abuses of research is another reason that I want our conservation work to succeed.

Along those lines, I wrote this poem.

What must they think of us?

The subtle click and tap
of claws on sterile glass
and calipers on carapace

are seemingly but backdrop to
the tidy swish-and-kiss of Pen on Notebook Page
where Patterns murmur in the swelling queues
that wait to join some Noble and Eternal Grid.

And yet,
dramatic tales of each new notch-ed number
on a shell
would be told for generations
if any but the Pen were free to tell.

---

Finally, it is not often that one sees the practice of science depicted at all, much less artistically, so here is a contribution to the realm of Science in Art. This photo was taken by Pelf and edited by me.

I know, being in black and white does not automatically make it "art." I was interested in the mix of organic and geometric textures and shapes, so I ditched the colors.

Snails, whales, and fishermen's tales

Louis Armstrong predicted years ago what would happen if I moped around too much: the monsoon. I should have listened more attentively, because sure enough after all the grumping and bitterness I reported in my last post, the past few days have been mighty rainy. Then again, I have actually been enjoying the change of pace to mostly cloudy, somewhat cooler, off-and-on rainy weather. And at night there is a loud chorus of frogs that I did not notice before.

The ever-generous Pelf has been hosting me in KT at her place for the past week and a half or so, and I am trying to be helpful. TCC conducts Turtle Camp at schools in the region that serve communities near rivers. I have had the pleasure of attending the final three for this year. We spend two to three hours at each school with one grade, teaching them about turtles and how and why to protect them. Since my Malay is very limited, I mostly play a supporting role, but I have gotten to guide groups of kids in making origami turtles, which does not require too much talking, and is really quite fun! Here are some kids at the end of the penultimate camp.















Yesterday, after the last camp, we also conducted one River Survey in which TCC staff and volunteers meet with river fishermen from a village to interview them about their fishing habits, their encounters with turtles, and their consumption of turtle eggs. As it was just Pelf and me yesterday and I am not proficient enough in Malay to conduct interviews, she did the real work, but it was fun and inspiring to sit in a roadside food stall (more like an open-air restaurant) and talk to these fellows that fish the rivers.

Here they are, pretty tickled, I think, to take a picture with this orang putih (white person). The stall owner (second from left) asked us to come back and bring him a print.

















Oh yeah, I also gave myself a haircut a few days ago. Thanks for noticing ;) There I am in my official TCC shirt and new hairdo--yippee.

It came in handy to know the word for "white" when one of the fishermen was telling us how he once saw a turtle that was putih all over--an albino! Quite rare. They were all so welcoming and friendly to us and the village headman (above, far right) would not let us pay for our own drinks. Pelf says the headmen in general are very cooperative in arranging the meetings, and fishermen are almost always very open and forthcoming in the interviews. On the way home, she and I were discussing how in some ways, being friendly young women may be an advantage in this case, since we are less intimidating to the fishermen than would be people who are older, fiercer, or more...male.

The owner of the food stall had this GIANT fish in a tank at the back of his place. He said it came from the river. I estimate its length at about 0.5 meters. Anyone know what kind it is?











In between the school camp and the survey with the fishermen, we had time to check out the exhibits at two nearby government-run information centres: one on turtles and one on aquatic biodiversity in general. They had some pretty nice specimens, and it was a good escape from a couple of rather sudden and quite torrential downpours. The whale skeletons at the Galeri Biodiversity Akuatik put me in mind of childhood days in the NC Museum of Natural Sciences with Dad.








Most of the drive back to KT was along the coast, and Pelf agreed to stopping at a giant rock outcrop so we could take some photos. A huge snail was there to greet us when we headed down toward the water. Estimated length: 12 centimeters. Estimated speed: 6 meters per hour.













The coast is gorgeous, and there were also lots of wetlands and mangroves along the drive that I would have loved to explore, but that will probably have to wait until I have my own car and some good rubber boots--soon I hope!



Meg's Music Library Trivia No.2
To what line from what song does the first sentence of this post refer? (First correct answer gets a complimentary giant snail. You know you want one.)

"Then he took and he ate up all of my corn..."

For no apparent reason, today was the first time that I really just wanted to go home, call it quits, and pretend this all never happened. There was no big incident, I just feel worn out and grumpy and impatient with all the little things that make this whole adventure a challenge. I hope you will take the following for what it is: my reflections at a low point, not my pronouncement on the experience or the place in general.

In my journeys through the internet today I learned the oh-so-useful term “gaslighting” which refers to a relationship dynamic wherein someone habitually discounts your reality, eventually causing you to question your own sanity and ability to perceive things in the world. One specific form gaslighting can take is something which the term "mansplain" (a word I do not really approve of, although it is funny) has been coined to describe: instances when someone (often a man) feels he is entitled to self-importantly educate those around him (often women) on things he really does not know much about, and in which his audience is really quite expert. I think most women and some men will recognize the phenomenon. Rebecca Solnit describes it masterfully for those who are unfamiliar.

I have experienced “mansplanation” here in Malaysia occasionally with regards to the U.S.—people trying to explain to me how things in the U.S. are. I want to say, “Actually, no, that’s not at all how it is. I should know; I’m from there.” But everyone is really very well meaning, so unfortunately for my sanity I am not enough of a petty jerk to try to correct every innocent misstatement about my country just for the sake of accuracy. Similarly, I have not been able to discover a productive way of dealing with the open male stares and cries of “hello!” and “I love you; I miss you!” that I endure whenever I try to do something reassuring for myself, like walk down to the corner and buy something that I want, or go for a run. I am not actually afraid of these guys, but it is still very uncomfortable. Where and how to draw the line? I do not feel like I have ceased to trust my own perceptions of the world, but every time I allow my reality (i.e. I know about my home; there is nothing freakish about my body or habits; I do not deserve to be harassed) to be openly denied without retort, it becomes easier to do the next time, which is pretty scary.

Back home I have often thought about how difficult it must be for immigrants who leave professional positions in their own countries to take up work in the U.S. for which they are wholly overqualified, but for language and cultural barriers. My experience is nowhere close to that, but I do feel I am getting a taste of the discouragement, demoralization, and silent shame of not being able to speak or function as the independent educated adult that one knows oneself to be. It is humbling at best.

Speaking of educated, I also ran across an interview with the host of a show called Dirty Jobs, which echoed something I have been saying for years: not everyone should go to college. Time was, there used to be a whole array of skills that were valued in a person: mechanical, physical, intellectual, creative. These days one could easily draw the conclusion, as Sir Ken Robinson has so delightfully pointed out, that the whole purpose of the U.S. education system is to produce university professors. Which is not a bad thing, it is just insufficient to perpetuate a functional society, because, as so many of us hypereducated 20-somethings are discovering, society really only needs a few university professors. Especially in this economic climate, most PhDs are going to have to find some other way to put local fair trade organic granola in their cereal bowls.

Living in Mangkok has opened my eyes to just how excessively educated I already am. And it is bizarre to realize that at times I am essentially an Agent of the West: introducing people to gmail and facebook and laptops and all that they imply. It is not that I have attempted (in my all-too-limited Malay) to talk about things like “self efficacy” and “personal freedoms” and “rights and responsibilities” and all the other jargony concepts that are (for better or worse) deeply embedded in my very-American person, but I am aware that the ways I behave differently from those around me are sometimes outgrowths of unstated cultural assumptions that I hold subconsciously. I think this confusion and heightened self-awareness and general discomfort is what the jargonists like to call “cultural exchange.” Goody.



P.S. Ten points to the first person who can ID the song lyric in the title from memory--no googling! Whee!