Avet Vagari: A Wedding, a Garden, and a Day for Eating

After volunteering with a food donation project in the city of Ipoh, I settled in for my first full week teaching in Ampangan Woh. It felt like a long, long week, but I was glad not to have to cancel any more classes for a while, and also relieved not to have to return to the grocery store. Classes continued to progress, with my illiterate students struggling to memorize pronouns (and understand the difference between personal and possessive pronouns, which are identical in both Bahasa Melayu and Bahasa Semai, and are differentiated only by word order and sentence structure), my children’s class learning to count up to twenty and identify their family members (a sneaky way of figuring out who is related to whom) and my advanced classes working on building sentences with prepositions and past tense verbs (“how can ‘read’ be pronounced differently than ‘read’ and how on earth do you pronounce ‘bought’”).

THE WEDDING

The week ended with something I had been looking forward to for two weeks – a wedding, which Angello had told me about before I had even come here, and which the entire village had been talking about and planning since before my arrival. Friday evening relatives who have left the village (including seven former students of Angello’s who have moved to Kuala Lumpur to study English full time, and one daughter of my host mother who lives with her husband and one-year-old daughter in Cameron Highlands, where she makes good use of her excellent English working in a hotel) returned to be part of the festivities. Saturday morning dawned, and at 8 am I was told that I should go to shower, as the rest of the day people would be getting ready for the wedding. I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but, as is my general modus operandi here, I simply followed directions without asking questions.

Later in the morning, when I followed my host mother down to the bottom of the village to help cut up vegetables, I peeked inside. Apparently “getting ready for the wedding” can also mean “hacking up chickens in the shower”.

While the men of the village worked on cutting the meat, the women sat around a shaded table slicing vegetables with machetes and tearing apart tapioca leaves. I joined them as we prepared food for all 300 people of the village, plus guests from the villages below. My host father told me he bought 100 kilograms of rice for the celebration. Luckily, in a place so focused on community, the whole village was helping, gathered in the grassy area below the slope. We cooked all morning, and then returned to the house. Wak Ella, the daughter living in Cameron Highlands, explained to me that the bride and groom would have “discussions” with their family, then they would have a small ceremony, and then they could eat. But we, she said, could eat all day. In fact no one outside the immediate families is invited to participate in the “discussions” or the ceremony, and there isn’t space where we were cooking to have everyone eat together, so individual households retreated to their homes with bowls of food from below, and ate separately. We spent the afternoon visiting various neighbors, where we ate more of the same food. Every house we entered set out for us plates of the food we cooked together, so that we ended up eating the same lunch four or five times. We spent the evening cooking chicken for dinner, which we ate in a similar manner, a similar number of times (unfortunately all of the village got a little sick for a few days from the chicken, but I take responsibility only for the vegetables).

Everyone said that “maybe” there would be some dancing in the evening, so I kept on waiting for that, but evening, by my definition, came and went with no dancing or activity at any kind. “Evening,” apparently, is different here, because at about 11 pm, all the girls in the house started doing their hair and getting ready, and a half hour later, we all traipsed down the slope, across the river, and up the stairs to the main road. There, on the road just in front of the jungle, a bunch of people – some I recognized as my students, some I had never seen before and who I later learned had come up from the villages below – had already gathered, as had a band that had just started playing. At first no one was dancing, but with a little encouragement from me (part of my job, after all, is to build self-confidence and overcome shyness), soon everyone joined in. More people arrived from the villages below us, and I had a great time, dancing and chatting with my students and neighbors. It was nice to hang out with them in a non-school setting (although they still insisted on calling me “Teacher” and I was shocked to realize how long it had been since I had heard my name). We stayed until about 3 am, but I could hear the music from my room until about 8.

TWO COMMUNITY PROJECTS

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep very much Saturday night, but I had big plans for Sunday. While the village was sleeping off their all-night party, I was preparing for the arrival of a teacher from the somewhat nearby town of Malim Nawar, and the coordinator for the Northern Region, whose job is to make sure that everything in those centers runs smoothly. She, however, had gone far above and beyond her responsibilities, and had, through Facebook and other social media, raised over USD 300 to buy presents for the kids in Ampangan Woh. She had gone on a shopping spree at every discount shop she came upon, buying books, games, art supplies, badminton rackets, puzzles, even recorders for around 30 kids. She also bought school shoes for them, after learning that some students leave school only because they wear out their shoes and are unable to buy new ones. She had then packaged up all those things into cute little tote bags, one for every child. The kids were (and still are) ecstatic. They proudly whip out their new colored pencils in every class, and I wake up to the sound of recorders almost every morning. I can’t decide whether they’re worse than the roosters. The packages of colored modeling clay were torn open instantly and, although the colors have been rolled and re-rolled together so that it’s all gray now, are still a favorite.

In addition to the donation project, we also started a garden, in the hopes of adding to the village’s supply of fruits and vegetables within easy walking distance of the homes here (while things like tapioca and bamboo grow close by, other vegetables like pumpkins and tomatoes require a trip deep into the jungle, usually a full day’s work, or a motorbike ride down to town). All the kids planted at least one seed – tomatoes, pumpkins, watermelons, even passion fruit – and we set them in the classroom to wait for sprouts. Sprout they did, especially the tomatoes, so later in the week we moved them to a sunny spot behind the house. They shot up, as did the pumpkins, and seemed like they were growing quite contentedly. Unfortunately, the last week or two has seen huge downpours (I guess they don’t call it the rain forest for nothing, and the rainy season is on the way) in the evenings and at night, which seem to have been too much for the infant tomato plants. Two good pumpkin plants survived, though, so last week a few of the kids and I took them to a spot past the rows of houses where I was told we could plant them in the ground. Planting there required some clearing of the jungle, though, which the kids were thrilled to take care of, hacking away at branches and roots with machetes from their homes. They are still growing, and the kids love going to the spot where they are to check up on them. As I walk there in the mornings, I can usually count on at least one shout from a house “Teacher! Nak buat apa?” (“Teacher! What are you doing?”) and all it takes is a reply “Siram labu” (“Watering the pumpkins”) to have an escort. We do still have three tomato plants, but I have taken to snatching them into my room anytime the sky looks like it might rain, and keeping them there overnight, just in case. They’re too small to go in the ground just yet, but if they continue to grow and get stronger, we’ll be able to bring them over to join the pumpkins in the next couple of weeks. We had another round of planting a few days ago, and although we don’t have any new sprouts yet, I’ve got my fingers crossed.

HARI RAYA

One of the biggest holidays in Malaysia, at least for the Muslim Malay population, is Hari Raya, or Eid Al-Fitri. The country has two days of public holiday, in celebration of the end of Ramadan, and schools are closed for the entire week, to allow for the excessive feasting that goes on after the month of fasting. Wanting to experience a truly traditional celebration, I traveled to Alor Setar, the capital city of the conservative Muslim state of Kedah, where a friend of mine, a Malay teacher who works on Tioman Island, has family. It took me a total of five buses and twelve hours to travel the approximately 300 kilometers, due to the huge volume of traffic traveling for the holiday. When I finally arrived, my friend met me at the bus station, and we took a cab to his sister’s house. The driver offered us dates, standard fare for the breaking of the fast, and then drove like a maniac to the house. I was relieved when we got out. My friend’s sister welcomed us into her house, introduced us to her daughter, and fed us laksa, spicy fish and noodle soup, and continued to feed us sausages, crackers, and cookies for the rest of the night. At about 1 in the morning, another sister and her family arrived to pick us up and take us to their parents’ house, where we would spend the weekend. The house was about a half hour’s drive from the city, in the jungle. Unlike my home in Ampangan Woh, however, the house is not part of a village but is instead completely isolated from anything else. It was interesting to see, but I’m glad I live around other people. We woke up at 4 am Sunday morning to eat breakfast before the rise of the sun – Sunday was the last day of Ramadan, and I had decided to fast alongside my hosts – and then went back to sleep until about 10 am. We spent the morning lazily getting ready for the day, and then went to the market to pick up some things for dinner. I pitied the people working all day selling food, knowing they had seven or eight hours left until they could break their fast. It’s easier here, though, than elsewhere in the world, where summer days are much, much longer. The hardest part of fasting was the thirst – far more than food, after spending hours in the Malaysian sun, I wanted a drink of water. We spent the afternoon visiting friends and family around the city, including two women who was working at a stand on the side of the road roasting and selling chicken, who were thrilled to let me sit with them and pretend to be a roadside chicken-seller for a while. With about an hour to go before the breaking of the fast, we returned to the house (laden with chicken for dinner) and watched Malaysian soap operas (but mostly the clock) until finally we gathered around a rug on the floor, heavy with plates of food, with water glasses in our hand, so that not a moment after the first syllable of the call to prayer we were quenching our thirst. We ate nasi ayam, a favorite Malaysian dish that is a little too Chinese (not to mention expensive) for my Asli village. It is, essentially, chicken with rice, usually in a somewhat spicy sauce. It was good to eat something different – the previous week in Ampangan Woh had made me cringe at the sight and smell of the same food meal after meal, day after day (fortunately, a few days away with different food seems to be exactly what I needed – I am feeling much better now and am happy with the food once again). At midnight, we headed to the city, where a huge night market was selling all kinds of Hari Raya goodies, cookies and snacks and little cakes to be served to guests the following day, as well as traditional clothing for the holiday. By 2 am, though, I was sick of shoving my way through the crowd, and exhausted, and ready to go home. When we finally arrived back at the house, I was instantly asleep, and didn’t wake up until 10 am, when everyone got ready. I put on a baju kurang, the traditional Malay dress, that one of my friend’s sisters had lent me for the day. It looks just like a Tajik kurta, except with a floor length skirt instead of pants below the long dress. It was also about a thousand times hotter than my lightweight kurta, and I found myself really missing the thin fabric and short sleeves. I had to take it off halfway trough the day because of the heat. We spent the day travelling from house to house, eating a meal in every spot (a lot like the wedding in Ampangan Woh). The food was great, luckily – yellow curry and noodle soup and more laksa and biryani rice. In the evening, the house filled up with the rest of the family, and a lot of kids. As soon as it got dark, the kids brought out fireworks, a favorite part of Hari Raya (although some of those kids seemed a little young to be playing with fire and I couldn’t help being incredibly nervous). We had, it seemed, a never ending supply of sparklers and others – as soon as one box was emptied, another one appeared, so the next morning the ground was completely littered with used fireworks (in Bahasa Melayu, literally, “fire flowers”). I left early the next morning to return home, which took another twelve hours. By the time I arrived, I was definitely glad to be back. Although technically my classes were only cancelled Monday and Tuesday, classes were mostly empty for the rest of the week. As the kids were all out of school, a lot of people had gone to visit family members deeper in the jungle, and those who were home were mostly in a vacation mindset, so it was a quiet week, with small classes.