Sips from the waterfall

You can see photos here--I'm having trouble uploading them to the blog itself.

When I am staying in Mangkok, I wake up to the sounds of many roosters crowing, goats and sheep maaaing and the mother and grandmother of the family out in the kitchen making the pre-dawn meal to be eaten before the Ramadhan fast begins at sunrise. The food is great: lots of curries, spicy fish, and stir-fried vegetables all eaten with rice and followed by various kinds of very sweet sweets. Luckily I was schooled at an early age in the art of eating rice with my hands (thanks Mom!) so I jumped right into that with no problem. Locals boil their water, but almost never drink it plain. It is made into tea (often VERY sweet, even by Southern U.S. standards) or mixed with fruity syrups in alarming colors, but it is liquid, so I am happy. Everyone in Mangkok has been warm and welcoming to me. They ask how old I am and if I am married and are very curious to know about my family. They are surprised when they learn that I will be staying in the village so long, and they seem pleased that I love to wear sarongs and t-shirts like everybody else does. The kids have already accepted me and will often wave and ask where I am going as I walk by. They call me Kak Meg. Kak is short for kakak, which means “older sister” and is used as a respectful form of address for young women—something like “miss” in Southern U.S. usage.

In the daytime I have often been occupied helping with craft projects that the kids are doing at TCC. They are making lanterns for the upcoming Chinese Lantern Festival. We also have several clutches of young turtles for which we collect morphometric data (weight, length and width) periodically. They are so cute!

Wherever I go I am usually the only white lady around, so people are very interested in my appearance. Four or five people have complemented me on my “tall” nose, the kids are very curious about the fact that I have hair on my arms, and lots of people want to take my picture. I am flattered and rather amused.

This past week we hosted Debbie and Marilyn, two Australian ladies who visited TCC as part of a six-week tour of various river turtle conservation projects around the world. They are involved in the conservation of the Mary River Turtle in Queensland, which was only discovered in 1996, and is endemic to (only exists in) the Mary River. It was great to get to know them, and helping to show someone else around made me feel a bit more confident myself. They stayed at a small family run resort not far from TCC, which would be a great place to stay if you ever think about coming to visit me here.

Earlier this week our Aussie friends accompanied Pelf and me on a little Setiu River reconnaissance mission. We scoped out various points along the river where I may be able to take water samples from land rather than having to hire a boat. It was great to get out in the field and explore the back roads along the river. I saw rice paddies, small oil palm and rubber tree plantations, sand mining, grazing land, and lots of beautiful birds and flowers. On our way back to Mangkok I spotted a monitor lizard just walking along the side of the road. These lizards are SO BIG--close to 2 meters in length--but apparently they are scared of people so they are not dangerous. Phew!

We also got Malek, one of my neighbors in Mangkok, to take us out in his boat at night to see the famous synchronized fireflies. I tried to take a picture, but it just came out black. Perhaps you can imagine…Pelf, Marilyn, Debbie, my host family’s eldest daughter Atikah, and me are all piled into a little flat-bottomed boat with jolly Malek manning the motor and a generous dusting of unfamiliar stars overhead. It is very dark and still on the river. I cannot tell exactly where we are because the bank is obscured by the complete blackness of the tall mangrove palms and their mirror image in the water. Here and there I can see lights on houses blinking through the trees to the East. We move farther upriver. There are a few fireflies in some tall trees that we pass, but Malek says, this is nothing. Finally we are just about to turn around, thinking it is not a good night for fireflies, when we come upon some low bushes right at the bank that are absolutely FILLED with them! The tiny beetles give off a faint greenish yellow light and they all blink together like a much more beautiful version of Christmas lights. It looks like a crowd of stars have gotten tangled in the shrubbery and are trying to signal a rescue by flashing in unison. We cannot stop saying “Wow!” Malek brings us right up to the bushes so that we can hold the fireflies in our hands, and I am trying to soak up the magic of being surrounded by these little creatures. On the way back to the dock, I am wide-eyed and grinning in the breezy darkness. Malek is singing Hari Raya songs and announces happily that there are only two more days of fasting left in Ramadhan. As we all walk back into Mangkok by flashlight, he makes me laugh by telling me that I look like a fisherman with my pants rolled up and my sarong-turned-purse holding my camera across my shoulder. Marvelous.

Ramadhan, the Muslim fasting month, ended on Thursday evening. Pelf and I tried fasting for the second time on Thursday. It was easier the second time around than it had been when I tried it a few days before—probably because I made a point of drinking a lot of water before dawn. Thirst is definitely harder to endure than hunger. We broke our fast at “my” house and later let the kids play with the lanterns they had made. Turns out the main activity with lanterns is relighting them when the candles blow out, but I think they had a lot of fun with it. At some point in the evening we got a call from Zam, one of the guys who runs the WWF sea turtle hatchery down the road, saying that many green sea turtle hatchlings were emerging. We dashed out, piled about ten kids into our two cars, and drove down to watch the release of the baby turtles. I had never seen sea turtles in the wild before! It really does look like the sand is boiling with baby turtles. They are black with white edges on their flippers, and they flap and scramble over each other without ceasing, trying to get out of the protective cage placed over the nest and out to the sea. I was impressed by their stamina.

We carried the 100+ anak penyu (baby sea turtles) that emerged that night out onto the beach in buckets, and Zam made us all stand behind a line in the sand. On his cue we poured out the turtles and they ran toward the glow of his headlamp as if it were a magnet and they little iron filings. As they neared the water, he turned off his light and stepped out of the way as they disappeared into the waves under cover of darkness—off to try their luck in the big wide world.

The following day was Hari Raya Aidilfitri (the celebration at the end of Ramadhan known in some places as Eid). Everyone dresses up in new clothes and goes to prayers, and then goes around visiting friends and family. We visited a number of families over the course of the day in Mangkok and everywhere we were invited to eat and drink. I was so full! We sampled a wide variety of sweets that you can buy in the store, but every family also served two homemade traditional Hari Raya foods: ketupat pulut, which is sticky rice wrapped in palm leaves, and tapai, a packet of rice that has been fermented with yeast and wrapped in a rubber tree leaf. Tapai tastes a bit like Japanese sake (rice wine). After a whole day of visiting and eating I was exhausted and happy to head back to KT for a few days to stay with Pelf while my host family visits relatives.