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?
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!
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.
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
