Dirty days diggin' in Malaysia

Habitat House

One book (pathetic reading rate), 0.25 of a house, 4 countries and 0.6 of a tour of South East Asia later and I find myself in the beautiful capital of Vietnam, Hanoi.

But back to Malaysia. I landed in Kuala Lumpur and did a quick city tour before catching my connecting flight to Borneo. KL is a great city with a skyline of unique mosques, crumbling and colourful colonial-style buildings and loads of shops and fabulously fresh and cheap food (Chinese, Malaysian and Indian). The people were also amazing which can change one's perception of a country fast and furious. I was treated to lunch by the sweetest Malaysian woman whose son was a famous DJ on the radio and who invited me to her other son's wedding after five minutes of conversation.

The only real concrete plan I had for my three-month tour of South East Asia and beyond was to pour actual concrete in Kuching, Malaysia with an organization called Habitat for Humanity. They build houses and raise money to assist families who are living in poverty and are unable to finance their own homes without the assistance of no-interest loans, volunteer builders and purchasing a house at cost. They have a program called Global Village where you can basically lead or join a group in various locations around the world and spend a portion of your holiday volunteering to build the house and donating funds.

I was luckily able to link up with a group of Japanese English teachers during their Golden Week holiday. The location was Kuching, Malaysia on the island of Borneo. A former headhunter’s paradise (and not the Ivy League business kind), Kuching was clean, orderly, beautiful and very westernized. It was not at all what I had expected having visited China and Thailand. Malaysia is definitely the richest of the three. 

I decided to fly Air Asia to Borneo. It is the Southwest of Asia and it was really neat to see all of those business case studies in action with flight attendants taxiing the runway and pilots cleaning the seats for about a 5-minute turnaround on flights. You don’t even get seat numbers and it is a fight to get the best first come first serve seats on the flight! 

I arrived in Kuching earlier than my team and was introduced to the man who would be our tour guide for the week. He was super Genki (Japanese for energetic/excited) and he went on to tell me that he is not normally so giddy but that he didn't think he was driving us that night so he was at the bar getting toasted with his mates and that was why he was a bit "off his rocker."  Not really something a future passenger wants to hear from their driver. Once my team arrived we headed to a lovely dorm-style guest house where we were to stay for the next week.

The next day was orientation and a tour of Kuching. The team was a really great mix of interesting people, from musical theatre enthusiasts to world peace boat participants to aspiring writers. We were all really anxious to get the job started the next day.

The Build

On our first work day, we drove an hour and a half to our worksite in a remote colourful village in Borneo, quite the opposite in modernity to Kuching, and were greeted by about every man, woman and child that lived there. Shouts of "Hello" could be heard as we drove up to the site. It was the start of an almost constant stream of "hello" "hello" conversations that would make up the bulk of the dialogue that week between the locals and our work team. It was a Saturday so packs of Doe-eyed children could be caught peeking out from every door, cracked window, bush and street corner. 

The first day was straight to work and the routine was pretty much the same each workday. We would work up a sweat (which took about 2 seconds given the steamy heat) for about an hour after we arrived, then recharge with some chocolate Milo, tea, water and local treats (think fried banana and pumpkin samosas...so good), then we would work again till lunch where we would be treated to some local cuisine at the home of a relative. After lunch we would walk around and explore the village for a bit, with a train of schoolchildren following behind and virtually begging to have their mugs taken and then to see the result on our digital camera screens. The afternoon was more work and another break and then a sweaty, smelly, sleepy drive home. 

The family whose house we were building consisted of Ma and Pa (33 years old apiece) and their three beautiful, sweet and somewhat shy children; two daughters and one precocious son. They greeted us in their formal clothes and shook our hands in traditional Malaysian style, which is to put your hand to your heart after you shake hands to indicate that you are greeting the person with your heart. They then quickly jumped into their grubby clothes and became a permanent fixture of our work team.

It was fascinating to see how you could build a house using bare hands instead of high–tech western machinery. Of course, it takes a bit longer and the house isn't the same quality, but we sure left there with more sinewy biceps than we had when we arrived. Some of the jobs we did were mixing sand, cement mix, water and stone together for the house foundation. We would mix it by rotating in a circle alternating people with hoes and shovels. It was true grunt work and we were all into the manual labour. Other than that we spent time bending wires for the housing frame, connecting them together, digging the foundation, laying bricks (my all-time fave), carrying bricks, etc. We even managed to put 12-foot poles into the hard ground through a combination of jumping on them and then using this insane iron device that made the rest child’s play. It really was a bit like magic. Sweaty magic!

While we were doing all of this a couple of paid carpenters were putting up the beams and the roof for the house. A bit of trivia, when Malaysian Muslims build houses they write a prayer on pieces of cloth and then get that cloth blessed and attach a piece to every corner beam of the house. It was a special ceremony.

By the end of the week, all of our work culminated in something that actually looked like a house!! I felt such a great sense of accomplishment and it was awesome to physically see the improvements on the house at the end of each day. Everyone was really into each job and gave each other back-patting support and relief when needed. It was a real team effort, led by a super site manager. It was also really great to see how the whole neighbourhood stood behind this family and helped in any way they could to make us as comfortable as possible when we were not hauling logs or slamming poles into the ground.




As for the neighbourhood kids, they seemingly have so much less than I was used to as a kid. Amusing themselves with bugs and construction implements, stray animals and each other. The toilets are what we would consider unsanitary, flies had bbq's on kid's faces as they slept and tables and beds were scrapped for coverings on floors (some of them did of course have T.V.s and all of the neighbours would gather around to watch). But these kids were happy. There was a sense of community and safety and acceptance and trust which was really refreshing.

On the last day of the build, we spent half of the day playing with the kids. Everything from "duck, duck goose" to "freeze tag". We managed to entertain about 30 kids (including ourselves and the watching village folk who probably had the most fun in terms of entertainment value) for about 3+ hours. The kids even ran after our van as we pulled away from the site. It was wonderful.

Longhouse Living

In between the workdays our saggy arms and heavy eyes needed a little reprieve, so we had some cultural activities scheduled. One was a trip out to a longhouse to spend the night (a fabulous prospect for little ol' no insect tolerance me). We headed on a three-hour bus tour and then a sketchy but thrilling long canoe-type speedboat ride to the longhouse. We arrived amidst the rubber trees and mosquitoes near dusk and toured the longhouse, had a great meal and saw a dance put on by the local Iban tribe. We all got to do a little dance actually. The deal with the longhouse is that the Iban tribe (former headhunters apparently) lives in this big long wood house. Each family gets a room and a section of the main area of the longhouse which is like their front garden. They spend their days bouncing
babies in hammocks, making rubber, weaving baskets, hunting, fishing and the like.

The tribes did not fawn over us. While they were very pleasant, we seemed more of an interruption and annoyance to them than an exciting event. This is likely because the government forces them to accept tour groups into their homes. I wouldn't be so jazzed about that either I guess. We sat up late and sang to the tune of a couple guitars and drank more than our desired share of lemony rice win before retiring to our mattresses on the bamboo floors inside the longhouse (most of the other tourists stayed in a "guest" house near the longhouse but we were lucky enough to be allowed to sleep in the longhouse itself). The rice wine assisted with what would otherwise have probably been a very sporadic sleep and I crashed until about 30 roosters started crowing at about 4:30am. We had some breakie and did a quick rainforest walking tour before heading back to our little home in Kuching.

We also got to spend a morning at a cultural centre watching the production of handicrafts and learning some local dances. The dances were the highlight as our boys ended up looking like a bunch of wonderful flaming, uncoordinated Mr. Beans. It was comedy at its purest and a riot to watch. The intensity of the facial expressions on the guys was overwhelmingly hysterical and by the end of the lesson they had attracted a bashful audience of giggling ladies. Their best move was the chicken move if you can imagine. In the afternoon we headed back to the rainforest to see the feeding of some orangutans. It was wild to watch the tree line looking for movement of what would eventually be a swinging orangutan!


In the end, it will take about another 3 or 4 teams to finish the house. But being at least a small part in building the most basic of necessities, which for a while was nothing but a dream for this wonderful family, was a rewarding experience which I hope to have at some point again in the future.


Hope all is well in your necks of the woods!!!