The first round of visitors was a group of office folk - those wonderful people who live and work at the headquarters in Kuala Lumpur and consequently are in occasional need of a breath of fresh air. Since the air doesn't get much fresher than at Ampangan Woh, four of them headed up one Saturday evening in October. They arrived in time for tea and coffee with my host family who, despite being very shy among strangers, especially foreign strangers who don't speak much Malay, did their best to welcome them and communicate. We woke up early Sunday morning and, after a breakfast of coffee and bread, trekked down to the river for a quick swim. I usually forget to take advantage of the beautiful river that flows through the village, especially now that the rain makes it impossible to swim after noon, so I was glad that the visitors gave me a good excuse to get up early enough to jump in. When we could drag ourselves away from the beautiful water, we headed back up to the house for my favorite lunch of cassava and chilies. After lunch, I joined them on a day trip to Cameron Highlands, a popular tourist destination only an hour away from the village. Cameron Highlands is famous for its strawberry and tea plantations, as the altitude lets the temperature drop enough for these plants to survive. Though the drive was only an hour, the road was extremely winding, up through the mountains, back and forth along a relatively narrow road. It was hard to admire the gorgeous views of the Perak landscape as we were tossed from one side of the backseat to the other. I was glad when we arrived and got out of the car, a little paler, maybe, but in one piece. We headed first to the Boh Tea Plantation, one of the largest growers of tea in Malaysia. We climbed up to the lookout point, from where we could admire more or less the same views as on the car ride, but also look out over the massive fields of tea. The day was, unfortunately, a bit hazy, but the lookout was impressive nonetheless. When the rain started, we headed back down to the factory, where a cafe sells more kinds of tea than I even knew existed, as well as such western delights as apple pie and carrot cake. We sat enjoying our dessert until the rain let up, then headed to the town of Brincang, one of two famous places in the Cameron Highlands. With no real goal or to-do list for the afternoon, we wandered aimlessly, enjoying the cool weather up in the mountains. When we'd exhausted the sights of the town, we drove to the other side, the town of Tanah Rata, where we had a delicious dinner of Indian food, and, after hitting a small fresh food market, returned to the car and drove back to Ampangan Woh. I said goodbye, and they continued on back to Kuala Lumpur.
More visitors came the following weekend. Seven teachers-in-training joined us for the most exciting part of the month: an Ampangan Woh Halloween Party! When I pitched the idea it was at first met with some resistance. The people in the village are terribly afraid of ghosts, and supernatural sightings are not uncommon. People talk of a woman dressed all in white, a woman with no head, and (most recently) a woman who wears a traditional Malay dress. These show up in empty houses, or lurk around in the dark jungle after the sun sets and are treated not as strange possibilities but as absolute, incontrovertible fact. Elma, my trainee and live-in-translator, translated Halloween as "Hari Hantu," or "Ghost Day." Once I explained that while in the past, and for some people, Halloween might have been a day to celebrate the dead, these days it is only for fun, a day to watch scary movies and eat a lot of chocolate. Thereafter, people started to get more excited, although I was cautioned by one of my older students (the same man who wore that Santa hat with the most solemn of expressions): "teacher, I'm very excited to eat candy and watch scary movies, but you can't invite any ghosts to the party." True to my word, I did not. Although a bunch of pasty white foreigners did show up! :)
In class all month, we had been learning Halloween vocabulary and making sentences like "my blood is drunk by that vampire" to practice passive voice, so excitement for Halloween kept building. We carved pumpkins in my youth class, and fried pumpkin seeds (apparently it is possible to make a great many things without an oven, but I was skeptical).
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| Youth students with their carved Jack-O-Lanterns |
On the 25th (the date chosen because it happened to be the last Saturday before Halloween, but it also turned out to be Elma's last weekend with us, so we were able to give her a big send-off), the teachers-to-be arrived in the afternoon from KL and we immediately put them to work. We were preparing fried noodles and fried rice, in two different houses, so I enlisted Enisen, a perpetually delightful 12-year-old boy who aspires to be a pilot and wants to learn English to talk with all his passengers, to choose three of the guests to bring to his house as the rice team. He said "I only want to bring girls." And so cooking groups were formed. Toward evening, everything was ready so we carried it all down the mountain to the canopy we'd set up in the flat area for the party. It was a big success, with mask-making (aka a disaster of glitter, which I am still finding places), dances by the kids' class, a performance of the Ghostbusters theme song by my youth students, who pronounced "I ain't afraida no ghost" with more sass than I even knew they were capable of (and a couple bold guests who were kind enough to join us), a mummy wrapping contest, apple bobbing that got everyone, children and adults, howling with laughter and dunking their entire heads into the basin, and other great party games. Around midnight, one of my adult students came to me and said "teacher, it's time to dance." So we did, until around 1:30 am, then all headed to bed. Sunday was another river morning, and then, exhausted by the day, we turned on a movie and had a typical Ampangan Woh weekend afternoon - lazing and drinking tea. They headed back home around 5, and I got ready for a busy week.
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| Mask artists |
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| Team games, with guests and students |
The following day, an NGO for women's rights came to our center to facilitate a small discussion on women's rights and issues in Malaysia. They were fascinated to learn how gender-equal Semai people are! My students were boggled by the questions the visitors asked, assuring them that there was virtually no domestic violence in Ampangan Woh, and that women are just as likely to work as their male counterparts. One of the group's major activities is teaching women different skills to give them the ability to make money independent of their husbands, so they talked about planning another trip to the village in the coming months to do something like that. The women were excited about it, not because they need a way to get money for themselves (everything in the village is divided equally, so any money they earned from such a project would be shared anyway) but because it would be a fun thing to do, and they really enjoy visitors.
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| The Perak Women for Women's group, with friends at Ampangan Woh |
It's a good thing, too, because the day after that, a fellow teacher (one teaching in Kedah, the northernmost state on the Thai border), Megan, brought her visiting sister and brother-in-law from Canada. It was Elma's last night, so she cooked a favorite meal while I ran classes with the help of a couple Canadians. They led a great project with our kids' class, making first handprint bats, and then a six-foot skeleton with individual bones (are you getting the Halloween theme here?). The kids absolutely loved making the bats, and walked around the village clutching them for days, while the skeleton (a team effort) hung in our classroom in front of the whiteboard for a week, until I got sick of running into him and folded him neatly on top of one of the bamboo beams. Now his foot dangles down and every now and them someone points to it and shouts "ahhhh teacher, ghost!" which they think is very funny. After dinner, with everyone in the village gathered because someone told someone we were going to watch a movie, we examined the set of DVDs that our guests had brought us. Elma wanted to watch a scary movie, but not TOO scary, so we put in Gremlins, which was a hit. Now I have kids occasionally asking for "bielie" movie, which I guess is how they interpreted "bright light." The following day we hit the river, before everyone (Elma included) headed back down to town.
Halloween itself dawned as any other Friday: I worked all day, but I was reminded constantly that I had promised a scary movie ("a really REALLY scary movie, teacher!") for the night. My adult class apparently was too excited, because around 9:00, half an hour before the end of their class, they could no longer focus on the passive voice, and started making sentences like "the movie was watched by us" and "we will be scared by the ghost movie." Correct sentences, but I could tell their hearts weren't really in the English class. When it was finally 9:30, I brought out an enormous bag of candy (it was all gone before I even set up the movie) and everyone in the village showed up with blankets and pillows to watch The Shining. I warned them that it was not a kids' movie, but apparently that is not a concept they understood. A five-year-old started to cry and scream that he was scared, and his mother said "be quiet, I told you it was a ghost movie!" He was the only one who didn't like it, though. Everyone else loved it, and it got some great screams. Most people hid under blankets at one point or another. When it was finished someone said, "teacher, so you have another ghost movie?" The day after, I had a gaggle of indigenous Malaysians running around the jungle saying "REDRUM REDRUM". So I think Hari Hantu was quite a success.
And I can't believe it is November already! October was over in a flash, and I have the feeling that the next few months will be the same. New Zealand in the middle of November, and Sri Lanka for Christmas!
