To pick up where I left you, with bated breath and a sense of anticipation no doubt, I was sat in my new local Restaurant Haji reading Catch 22. A great book by the way, really funny and I love a good war book. I digress... Bella missed the 8am bus from the Highlands so got the 11am and arrived about half one to see my table scattered with chai glasses and the remains of a roti. I needed to get on the internet and email a couple of people since it was Christmas Eve and all and I wouldn't have internet access again until at least Boxing Day.
Quick trip to an internet cafe, we bumped into Bella's sister. The whole familial way of referring to people is very confusing in Malaysia. People refer to each other as brothers or sisters when there is no blood, cousins, aunts and uncles can be anyone and in my job an uncle and nephew referred to each other as father and son which was well confusing at first when I hadn't got to grips with it. In the villages it was harder again, I would be introduced to another aunt or cousin and try to establish the acutal link and the girls wouldn't really know but they would know there was some blood relation somewhere or other.
We went back to the bus station and caught the Tapah-Kampar bus, there was a mad ass traffic jam and I thought there had been an accident or something (seen a couple of bad ones here including my first sight of a dead body...) but no, it was just really badly sequenced traffic lights at one of the junctions. We got off the bus at Temoh which is just off the main Tapah Road and about five minutes walk, a hell of a lot less scary than Deera's village location!
Temoh is a lot different to Batu Sembilhan. There are only eight concrete houses so far but the government is building more, and most of the houses are concrete or brick based with wood and corrugated iron starting about a foot off the floor. They are much smaller houses and can have three generations living in them, that's why the government are building them more. They're not good quality buildings, just poured concrete and Bella's grandmother's house which she has been in less than a year already has some pretty big cracks, but she is lucky to have one of the new houses. I was amazed at the TV aerial mast which was a massive bamboo cane stuck in the ground with the aerial bodged on to it somehow, very old vs. new!
As we walked through the village we amassed a gang of about 10 kids following us to the house, I was the first white person there for a very long time and a lot of the kids had only ever seen white people on TV. After having food put in front of me almost immediately me and Bella went for a walk around the village and went to her uncle's house. Whilst here a two year old baby was plonked on my lap so his father could get a picture of his son with a white girl, rather surreal considering I'm terrible with children and the kid was proper freaked out by me!
On the way back to Bella's grandmother's house we went past a playing field of sorts and saw a load of local lads playing a game called sepak takraw. It's basically an elaborate game of keepy-uppy, with two teams and volleyball net played with a hollow wooden ball thing. This amused me for a good while, good looking, toned Orang Asli boys messing about in the late afternoon sun, t'was very Top Gun! The fun was spoilt by a local piss head hassling me and Bella's logical way to get him to leave me alone was to tell him I had a husband and kids in the Highlands, personally I would have told him 'fuck right off mate, you're fat, have no teeth, less hair and your boxies that I can see poking out of your pants look like they ain't been washed in a month, why in the world would I be interested in that?!'. Unfortunately my Malay isn't that good and my Orang Asli non existent so I kept a stoney silence whilst Bella invented a life for me. Next we mooched to the local waterfall with her neice Theresa who was well cute, apparently it used to be a beautiful site and then loads of Malays started going there for picnics and it got ruined and for a reason Bella doesn't know the little lake there was drained and people stopped going. Such a shame it's been ruined because people from the village have been going there for generations and kids like Theresa will never know how beautiful it was.
When we got back to the house a duck had been barbecued for me and I was made up! I explained to Bella that duck is a bit special back home, pretty expensive so a bit of a treat, so for a whole duck (in pieces obvs...) to be put in front of me and to be told to eat as much as I wanted was challenge accepted! I didn't eat it all but I made a pretty good effort and it was amazing, so juicy and amazing flavours going on. Me likey. After we had eaten it was time to go to church, kind of. I checked about a million times that no one would think me cheeky or disrespectful for attending the service but not praying or joining in and I was assured everyone would be fine with it. Being a commited atheist I could never bring myself to appear to worship but at the same time I really wanted to see how they worshipped, having attended Church of England primary and secondary schools and being forced to go to church three times a year against my wishes I know what a Christmas celebration should look like back home.
This one really surprised me. There was no priest, the service was kind of ran by Bella's auntie but everyone kind of chipped in with their ideas on what to do or sing next. There were 14 adults and 2 kids there plus me and the local drunk who was making a holy show of himself (excuse the pun) but he just got ignored. It was really nice how the service went, there were a couple of songs to start with, one of the local lads on his guitar, and then everyone there took it in turns to stand at the front and read form their own bibles the Christmas story in Malay and then explain to everyone their understanding of it. I was surprised that I understood where in the story they were, the rythm of the bible is very much the same and Bella said it's written in very dense language like the King James Bible is and that's why they were all explaining it to one another. A few more songs in Orang Asli, the Lord's prayer (again I recognised the rythm) and the service was over. I felt so privileged to have been there, it was a very community based service expressing their own thoughts and beliefs and not at all like the preachy services back home. Normally I will challenge anyone in a debate about God when they are openly expressing their faith but I felt touched that these people cared enough to worship. Oh and the language barrier would have been a particular challenge, I wonder how you say 'do you believe your God is omnipitent?' in Malay?!
Back at the house we sat on the floor, and I was getting quizzed - where are you from? What job do you do there? Are you married? Why not? Can I see a picture of your house? Poor Bella was having to translate for us back and forth but I suppose it's good for her language skills. Beds were set up and I was rather happy as I was pooped, me and Bella were sleeping on mats on the floor under a mossie net that was bright pink and I felt like I was sleeping in a castle! The fun and novelty of this was short lived when her uncle came back to the house drunk and started to have a domestic with her aunt, a window got smashed, things got rather heated so Bella got us to move into the bedroom where her other aunt was sleeping with her two sons. Bella said she was pretty scared and didn't want to stay another night which had been the plan so I told her we could go and stay in Tapah or Ipoh the next night if she wanted.
Woken the next morning by the standard assortment of animals already encountered at the last village, I had duck and rice shoved into my hand almost immediately and was expected to eat up. Another wander around the village and me and Bella had decided to get the bus to Tapah and if it was available to get on a bus back to the Highlands so we didn't have to pay for a hotel room unnecessarily. The ability to get about on Christmas Day astounded me, home grinds to a halt for at least two days but this was like any other day in Malaysia, which I really like because I hate Christmas. Dinner was at 11.30am and there was about 12 people sat on the floor surrounding a massive spread of all sorts of food, everyone said grace first which was a nice touch and we dug in, duck in about four different styles, ditto the chicken, rice, noodles, prawn cracker things, loads of vegetables, rice cooked in bamboo, something brown also cooked in bamboo which Bella couldn't quite translate for me, it was a feast indeed. When we had finished a load more food appeared as all the guests left and I was scared I would be expected to eat more but it was for the next lot of people who would inevitably be arriving.
After dinner we went to get the bus to Tapah and I shook Bella's grandmother's hand. I had to bend a considerable way down to do this, no joke this woman was up to my hip. I know Asians in general are shorter but this was just scary! I asked Bella why she was so much taller and she said it's likely because she went to school in Penang and had better food and stuff. So this visit was sadly cut short but I still feel I got a nice feel for the place. The lads here were cheekier, they were asking Bella to teach them English so they could chat to me and they were sat outside the house showing off with their guitars. The village was smaller with more of a community feel, I hope this doesn't change when more new houses are built and there is a little bit more physical distance between houses, the wooden houses have maybe two feet between them, the new ones about six or seven feet which does feel like it makes a difference. More good food, more good people, more kids catching their first glimple of a Westerner, and another amazing experience with one of my best mates...
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