Into the Rainforest

"Rainforest" is such an emotive word.  In ecospeak it's collocated with "depredation" and "global warming".  Seemingly it contains all that's good, including a few naked, pot-bellied humans, so wise they hide from the rest of humanity, apart from the odd photo opportunity with Sting (by these standards I must be very bad, liking humanity and only wanting to hide from Sting).  Apparently, chopping rainforest down is a wholly evil act, akin to rape, worse even than plagiarism, in the minds of middle-class western liberals.

Before I got to Borneo I learned that it has one of the largest areas of rainforest in the world and also one of the fastest shrinking.  Since I arrived I've kept my eye out for it, not sure exactly what I'm looking for.  It's so warm and humid here everything that isn't dead is green and if you concentrate hard enough you can actually see things grow.  Can these trees next to the main road be rainforest?  Surely not, they look too much like a copse in Surrey.  What about on that ridge over there?  Nah, I can see a JCB and a track and a patch of ground that looks like the Somme in 1916, maybe it was rainforest once, but not now.  Like when Sue and I were cruising in our yacht, rainforest is as elusive as the perfect bay, always over the next ridge or round the next headland, but never here.

Well, last Wednesday on Tioman island I found some.  Tioman starred as "Bali Hai" in the film "South Pacific" and the location hunters knew what they were doing.  It's a holiday island, but the numbers are limited by the fact that it has only a small airfield and the ferries from the mainland take about two hours, leave at random times and occasionally sink with all hands.  Apart from the tourist resorts on the coastal fringe the island is a forest covered rock rising to about two thousand feet.

Last Wednesday I walked across the island on one of its few roads then back along a forest trail.  Now I know.  Forest is to rainforest what a small parish church is to a cathedral.  In ordinary woodland the dominant plane is still horizontal, but in rainforest the vertical takes over, with massive hundred metre plus trees, like the pillars of a cathedral knave, supporting a high green canopy.  Monkeys are perfectly adapted to it, shinning up creepers like ratings on an eighteenth century ship of the line.  Rainforest is not jungle, you don't need to hack your way through it - so little light filters down to ground level that very little grows there and you walk on a soft, deep-pile carpet of dead and rotting matter which has fallen from above.  The cathedral metaphor is very persuasive, like in a cathedral it inspires a hushed awe, but unlike one it goes on and on, extending before you as you walk, inviting you to become profoundly lost.

At the end of my walk I emerged back on the coastal strip, blinking in the sunlight and feeling all of a sudden very exposed to the gaze of humans and other predators.

I may not have found the perfect bay, but I do now have a picture in my head of the rainforest.

Singapore

Tell a malaysian you've been to Singapore and you always get the same response - "ah Singapore, it's so clean."  This is said with an approving nod, but there is something at the back of the eyes that betrays a different emotion, something like "how the hell do you keep a country that clean?"  For malaysians going to Singapore is like visiting the home of an obsessive and domineering housewife, where you are scared to sit down in case you ruffle the cushions.  The feeling is definitely mutual - try reading the reviews on "trip adviser" of malaysian hotels by singaporean visitors, they are usually patronising and plaintive - "the room was dirty", "the service was poor", "there was mould in the bathroom", etc, etc.

Sue and I spent a few days there last week before travelling on to the malaysian island of Tioman.  I wanted to go more for its connection to the British Empire than for the shopping.  Singapore was the asian jewel in the crown dominating the Straits of Malacca, the throbbing artery of East-West trade.  The fall of Singapore in 1942 sounded the death knell of the Empire, because in the space of a few weeks the aura of white invicibility simply evaporated.  The british dropped "the white man's burden" like a shot on the quayside and elbowed their way onto the departing ships, leaving chinese militiamen to throw off their british uniforms and run home in their underwear for fear of being caught by the japanese.

Singapore is certainly clean and well run.  The parks are manicured and the underground trains hiss smoothly into the stations behind protective walls of perspex.  The downtown malls have all your favourite shops from Prada to Marks and Spencer and the streets are alive with the throaty roar of Lamborghinis.  Raffles Hotel is still there, perhaps more as a brand than in spirit and the whole place is a banker's paradise.  And yet, there is something of a siege mentality, a bit like I imagine existed in West Berlin.  Logically Singapore should be part of Malaysia and the singaporeans threw themselves enthusiastically into the Malaysian Federation in 1963, only to be given the bum's rush in 1965, for being too socialist and too chinese.  Since then it's been a city state with something to prove, the size of the Isle of Wight with a population of 4.5 million, economically interdependent with peninsular Malaysia, but forced to eye its bigger and poorer neighbour nervously across the Straits.

Waiting for our bus out of Singapore at 6.00am in a tatty edge of town mall we got to see a different side of the city.  We ate our rice and noodles cheek by jowl with hungover johns and exhausted hookers, some with remarkably big feet and adam's apples, and many with the distinctive twitch of the regular drugs user.  But then I guess in this city of traders and bankers, people are just one more commodity.

Sorry Facebook

I said in my last post I was on a steep learning curve when it came to using the internet for teaching.  I was obviously not as far up the curve as I thought.  As I started making friends with my students I began to feel less and less comfortable about the amount of information that it gave me about these young peoples' lives and Sue made it clear that she had serious misgivings about the way I was going about things.

So, I started to do some more extensive reading about Facebook's policies and their advice to educators.  I had not even realised that Facebook require you to be at least 13 years old before you can set up an account.  Many of my students ignore this by making themselves out to be older.  This also has implications because Facebook restrict the access people can have to the timelines of children aged 13-17, so by making yourself, say, eighteen when actually you are twelve, you over-ride all this stuff.

Anyway I've put my own house in order by deactivating my new Facebook account and all the friendships that went with it and making it clear to students that they must by over thirteen to join my Facebook English group.  I will also advise parents that I have set the group up and offer them a veto on whether their child can be in it.  Now things seem to be on a much better footing, my students are starting to use the site to communicate in English, but I am not their friend and know nothing about their lives that they don't disclose to the group as a whole.

I am still suspicious of Facebook and its motives, but I can also see that its rules and policies on setting up accounts and being who we say we are do serve a valid purpose.

Lost in cyberspace

I started a new experiment in my teaching career this week by setting up a Facebook group for my English students and it's been a steep learning curve.

My first task was to create a new Facebook identity in simple English which would be open to my students to look around.  Facebook doesn't like you doing this, they want you all in one place so they know who and where you are.  As a result, they don't make it simple or give you any help.  Anyway, having created my new identity, I then started to get quite a few "friend requests" from people I'm already friends with on my existing account.  It was at this point it struck how much Facebook behaves like a virus, albeit a largely consensual one.

Going through the process of creating my group it also hit me how insidious the Facebook model really is.  They want to keep us in their world and they make it subtly difficult to break out into the rest of the world wide web.  For all the talk of people like Mark Zuckerburg, they're just a highly commercial outfit with an aggressive and monopolistic edge.  Because they are trying to corral us all into their pen, one day Facebook will fall and its fall will be mighty and swift, for the simple reason that they will never be able to find enough inducements for us to stay.

Moralising about the internet aside I have now set up my group, leading to more interesting issues, the most pressing being, how do I know someone is my student when I get a friend request from someone whose name is in chinese script and whose image is a teddy bear?  I am slowly starting to recognise them, in many cases by looking at their photo albums, which in turn is giving me some interesting insights into the lifestyle of chinese teenagers in Sarawak and how whacky and culturally diverse it is, from my perspective at least.  What a strange world we live in and how much the better it is for all these people madly finding out about each other.

To the Longhouse

The area where Sue's schools are located is predominantly malay and therefore muslim, but around the Kabong area are dotted a number of iban longhouses whose children also attend the local primary schools.  At one school the iban children have invited Sue to visit their longhouse and yesterday she decided to take them up on the offer.

We hitched the bikes to the back of the car and drove down to the school, which is in a remote and truly idyllic location by a beach facing the South China Sea.  The longhouses have been vaguely described to Sue as being "further up the beach".  But, such is the segregation of the communities here that none of the mainly malay teachers have ever visited them.

We unloaded our bikes and set off up a track running parallel to the beach.  We were soaked with sweat in just a few minutes in the afternoon heat and humidity.  The coast is wild and remote and apart from the coconut palms the atmosphere is not unlike the dunes and salt marshes of East Anglia.  After about three kilometres we ran across a group of pupils from the school piled onto a motorbike.  They greeted us with a delighted "hello Madame Sue" and guided us another five hundred metres to their longhouse.

The longhouse is a ramshackle wooden building on stilts with a corrugated iron roof.  A few faces, some quizzical, some suspicious look down at us from the windows.  We smile up at them and say "hello" and most of them smile back.  I can understand their reticence, they can't see strange faces here very often and when they do it won't necessarily be good news.  One of the adults, a middle-aged woman, comes down to greet us when it is clear that we have some reason to be here.  She speaks to us in good English.  There are about 160 people living in the longhouse and she takes us for a walk around the perimeter and along a path to the beach.  We are followed by ten or twelve children and an inquisitive dog.

The ambience is squalid, purposeful and profoundly beautiful.  These people really live in their environment and draw all they need from it and they are surrounded by the tools and junk of their everyday lives.  Nets hang under the longhouse and there are chickens everywhere, running free and in cages.  From somewhere I can hear the squeal of pigs.  Down on the beach, which is in a sheltered muddy inlet, there are small wooden boats tied up.  Our guide tells us that there are many crocodiles this year, she has never seen so many.  But my sense is that crocodiles are seen as just another community - iban, malays, crocodiles, they all have their territory - and sometimes there is conflict.  I have my camera with me, but I take no photos although I'm sure if I ask they will say "yes".  I know if I take pictures they will be admired by friends as "interesting" and "picturesque" and this will in some way be a discourtesy to the iban who are proud of where they live and of their lives.

We are invited to stay and eat fish, but the evening is drawing in and we say thank you, but we must get home, promising to return.  We cycle back up the track to cries of "goodbye Madame Sue" and we incline our heads and wave back.  As we cycle I realise that Sue, as well as having wanted to see the longhouses, is also making a point and I respect her for this.