Dear Adela,

Hugh has written at length in answer to your query. I will add some thoughts. I realize that this is a voice from the deep past, and any of my perspectives may seem hopelessly outdated  – my apologies if anything that I write is offensive to anyone. The same goes for my terminology – I am using the terms of the time.

We spent 1965-66 at Melugu in the Second Division, living at first in Simanggang at the secondary school and later in a house in Melugu. There we helped to set up the resettlement scheme. In 1966-67 we lived in Kuching as boarders with a Malay family, making silent films for the government, mostly for the agriculture department, and travelling to various places throughout Sarawak to get the shots needed.

The languages we learned were, first National Language during three months of PC training, then Iban and bazaar Malay as we moved to Sarawak and were assigned to Second Division, and later the local dialect of Malay as we lived with a family in Kuching. We spent a lot of time with people who spoke no English, so we had to learn to speak in order to function as human beings. Whether it was grammatical or correct did not matter: it had to be functional.  People were very helpful in helping us learn language, to such an extent that I always felt I owed the world a debt of gratitude, which I eventually repaid by serving as a volunteer English tutor for immigrants to America for a number of years.

You mention Confrontation, the Vietnam War, and decolonization. Confrontation was very present in everyone’s mind. There were anti-aircraft guns at the airport and soldiers visible in many places in both First and Second Divisions in the months after we arrived.  Melugu was only 10 miles from the border and gunshots could be heard at times.  The Vietnam War was much less salient on a day-to-day basis.

Decolonization was happening, and nation building was at least as important. When President Kennedy was assassinated two years before our arrival, a PCV we later met first learned the news when he was offered condolences in an upriver longhouse within 24 hours of the event. To have news travel so far and so fast was unheard of.  Longhouses had only recently gotten electricity and the radio was establishing a new sense of national identity at a time when Malaysia itself was being formed. National language could be heard only on the radio. Transportation relied on aging aircraft, unreliable flight schedules, incomplete roads, and the much more important, always reliable if slow river traffic that kept the Divisions separate.

The vast majority of rural people were uneducated; that is, they had never attended any school. They had impressive skills at traditional crafts: dry and wet rice farming of many cultivars, steel making, boatmanship, hunting, weaving of mats in elaborate patterns, for the old women, ikat dying and weaving, for the next generation, elaborate embroidery, and many more skills.

But what you ask about specifically is life for PCV women and couples.  Because the assignments were different for couples than for singles, and different for women than for men, they had different experiences.  I saw single women placed as teachers in secondary and primary schools and working as med techs. The med techs in our group had been supposed to be distributed across Sarawak, but most if not all ended up in Kuching because the facilities did not materialize. The couples were assigned mostly to run 4-H clubs and do rural adult education. The single men worked mostly on rural development projects such as water catchment systems for water supply, or worked in secondary school teaching. 

Of all these jobs, the ones with the best fit of skills to need were in upper level secondary school, especially math, science, and English. There were not enough teachers for those levels and the jobs and roles were well understood by everyone. The PCV teachers could make a visible difference in the lives of their students. As I saw it, the disadvantage for the teachers was the cloistered English-speaking atmosphere that kept them separate from the rest of the community and prevented them from being able to learn the languages or participate in the culture. For most other jobs, a few PCVs figured out a way to succeed, sometimes very well, but many floundered, partly due to lack of job definition, lack of resources, or lack of the right skills.

As a part of our jobs in the first year, we visited many Iban longhouses, and in our second year, other upriver communities. We also vacationed in Sarawak, and traveled to visit other Divisions, and attended festivities such as weddings and holiday celebrations.

As a couple we were easier for people to understand, I think, than the singles. I think that my husband was expected to be some sort of government servant and I to be his largely functionless companion, which wasn’t that far from the truth. We stuck together, and (you ask about accommodations) in the evening were invited to sleep inside the dwelling of the headman as if we had been their relatives, and were provided with our own bed and mosquito net.  Where there was the most obvious segregation of men and women on those visits, it was bathing. A bunch of women would ask me to join them to go to the river and bathe several times a day.

People were friendly and openly curious about us. When  we walked down the verandah of a longhouse people would call out invitations to sit with them.

I was treated like royalty and like a curiosity. Many children had never seen a white woman, so I would hear kids telling each other excitedly to come and see me. Women would pinch my skin gently to see if the color was real. Sweet tea would be served or rice wine if it was a festive occasion, and there would be a barrage of questions: were were we from, did we come in an airplane, how long did it take to travel from our country, did we have any children, and, hearing not, how long had we been married. Sometimes more personal questions or comments followed such as  why I hadn’t had a baby yet – was it medicine? Didn’t I want one? Lean, beautiful, young women often admiringly asked me how I had gotten so fat (I was 5’5.5” and about 128 lbs)—was it lots of sleep? Or what? Did I eat something special to get so fat? There was great interest in the fact that I could speak any Iban at all and that I could eat rice. It was almost entirely women who surrounded me and asked me questions, while the men would talk to my husband, even if we were next to one another. But if I needed help or guidance, the men would be very willing to give me directions or help.

When there was music and dancing in the evening, it was mandatory that each of us take a turn dancing solo to the gongs. We could refuse, but would be shoved to the center of the circle anyway.

In the small towns, we shopped for supplies, and it was essential to know the Malay words for what one wanted so we could have some way to communicate with the Chinese shopkeepers. We tried to learn some Chinese but only ended up with a few phrases that we could say or understand: enough to get some cooked rice and stir-fry and tea. We went to some Malay celebrations, and there the women and men were separated.

Kuching, of course, was totally different. The family we lived with was a elderly widow and her four mostly grown children who had taken us into their home in a Malay section of town only because they were very poor.  None of them ever spoke English to me except perhaps to say Goodbye.

There, I associated entirely with women. One daughter shopped every day for food and cooked for us. The daughters took me to visit people in other houses in the feasting and visiting after Ramadan.  The mother talked to me every day, gave me instructions and neighborhood news, and let me know if something needed to be done.  For example, she told me never to iron clothes when there was a thunderstorm. I understood, but I forgot one day and sparks came flying out of the plug and cord during a storm. I lept up in the air, and she came running over and scolded me for forgetting. I never forgot again! If anything needed to be changed about our rental agreement, I was the intermediary between her and my husband.

People often asked if I had become Malay, and if I wanted to become Malay, religiously, that is. They understood my reluctance when they learned that I was to return to the U.S. and that my family would not agree with my making that decision.

I think that the PCVs wanted to help others, and many were able to do that, but overall they themselves were more helped then helping. The real gift they made was later, back home, as many entered professions that involved service and were finally able to connect skills with jobs. Others worked as volunteers.

One day years later in Canada I was coming out of the door of a crowded university building and a Malaysian female student was beside me.  A sheet of ice on a hill faced us. I had never met her, but I turned to her and said in National Language one of the phrases we had rehearsed so many times in training, “Don’t slip and fall!” She answered immediately, saying she had in fact fallen on the way to class, and then suddenly realized what language we were speaking and we laughed together.

Less than a year ago a PCV in our group came to visit us. I was reminded of how the PCVs all assumed that any PCV could visit any other one and would receive accommodation for however long the visitor wanted to stay, and both would share whatever there was available. We, too, had visited a former PCV not so long ago, and I realized that the bond and the open invitation are still there though we are 45 years older.

That far away part of the world was not forgotten. It holds a place in our hearts as part of our own growing up, and we still feel a connection.