THEN: This is my Form 3 class at Three Rivers. One of the boys standing in the back row was to become my boss at Unimas over 40 years later.
IF there is one thing I have learned from my Peace Corps experience is to never predict my future. Not only had my original plans been diverted from Penrissen to Mukah, but the short-lived student strike at Three Rivers School in 1965 had also cut short what had otherwise been a pleasant teaching experience for me when I got abruptly transferred to Serian.
Starting again in Serian
Serian town was about the same size as Mukah then.
Although there was one lonely service station, it was quite sufficient, as there were only five or fewer cars and 10 or fewer motorbikes, all owned by the Chinese shop owners.
No one in the nearby kampungs owned any form of transportation, except a bicycle or their own feet. The town did have two movie theatres, one playing mostly Malay and Indian movies and the other playing mostly western films released more than 10 years before. We favoured the latter, attending each weekend when there was a change of feature and avoiding the ever present rats which always out-numbered the paying customers.
The secondary school in Serian was less developed than Three Rivers. It would be the first year the school would be teaching form three classes and the school compound was much smaller and fewer facilities. There were also fewer ex-pats teaching than there were in Three Rivers.
I was assigned the same subjects to teach as at Three Rivers, this time at the form two and three levels. I also drilled my Form 3 class on test-taking skills to assist their performance on the Form 3 test.
The pass rate of that first Form 3 class was somewhat less than the record at Three Rivers, but most of the class did pass, including Richard Riot, the long-time Member of Parliament and who represents the Serian district.
As the 1966 school year was coming to a close, it occurred to me that one year at Serian was not enough to do all that I wanted to do for the school. I applied, and was approved, for a third year of service. I was also given leave to return home for a month.
When, after only two weeks, I was eager to return to Sarawak, I knew the Peace Corps experience was making some profound changes in me.
NOW: This was taken at a school reunion held in Kuching in 2005. Some of the same students in the photo on the left are in this one. The passage of time has produced changes in various ways in us all.
The second year at Serian Secondary was fairly much the same as the first year until May of that year when I met a very special woman. It may not have been love at first sight for either of us, but something must have quickly developed because a few months later, on Nov 4, 1967, we were married, accompanied by a nuptial mass at the Serian Catholic Church.
She has been by my side ever since, and this November it will be 45 years and counting.
The school year ended before my tour with the Peace Corps ended, so we spent about a month in Kuching while I helped train some of the incoming volunteer teachers. Then, in early January of 1968, after a teary goodbye between my wife, Cynthia, and her family, we departed Kuching for a new world and a different life.
It would be five years before Cynthia would see Sarawak again. For me, it would be much longer.
I know there are volunteers who leave Sarawak after two or three years with all intention to put their Peace Corps experience on the ‘back benches’ of their mind and move on with their careers and lives.
I also know that there are other volunteers who do not want to leave Sarawak at the end of their tour and go on to take jobs either in Malaysia or in the region, sometimes for the rest of their lives.
My case would fit somewhere in between these two extremes. Certainly being married to a local going through rather severe adjustment difficulties to the US at first would not permit me to put Sarawak very far in the recesses of my mind, but I wanted to move forward in my career. That entailed me earning a masters degree from Ohio University so that I could transition from public school teaching to a different career path.
My new career path took me to work for the Peace Corps domestically in New York; then in Washington, DC; and then another federal government agency before the transit authority in Washington, DC where I became the director of employee training and development and eventually director of all human resource management.
Ten years later I struck out on my own as an independent management consultant, eventually forming a corporation employing over fifty people and with contracts in a number of government agencies and private companies. Cynthia and I also opened a combination dry-cleaning plant and tailoring shop, which she ran.
But the ties to Sarawak were always there. These ties were reinforced in 1973 when we decided to adopt a child from Sarawak. With Cynthia’s mother’s help, a child was found, a daughter who was one too many for a family in a nearby kampung to afford.
In 1974 Cynthia went back to fetch Samantha, a little over a year old, but strong enough to help her new mother carry one of the bags, walking through the airport.
The ties were reinforced again when Cynthia’s father, whose family had cleared most of the land that is now known as Serian, bequeathed to Cynthia an acre of land on a hill, overlooking Kampung Kakai.
Over the following eight years, she came back to Sarawak several times to supervise the building of our new home.
And so it comes around
If anyone had told me prior to 1964 that I would spend over three years of my life in a country I had never heard of, in a part of the world of which I knew practically nothing, I would have snickered. If one had told me that I would marry a woman from that unheard of country and we would spend the rest of our lives together, I would have laughed harder. And if someone had told me that I would spend my retirement years in a place I could not even spell or pronounce, I would have fallen off my chair laughing.
By 2002 we had sold both our businesses. My wife almost single-handedly completed our home, which she had designed herself. All that remained to be done was to sell our upper middle class home in Virginia, which I did after posting it for only two days. I made the big move in May of 2002.
Before the move I had learned of the Sarawak campus of the University of Malaysia, otherwise known as Unimas. I had also learned that the Vice Chancellor of that institution was one of my students from Three Rivers School.
Shortly after arriving, I went to talk to Yusif Hardi, the tall, lanky student who made As in all of his subjects and who is pictured in two of the photographs featured in this article. He hired me as associate professor of management under a three-year contract.
My best student at Three Rivers became my boss.
Samantha, the little Bidayuh girl given to us because her family could not afford another child, recently celebrated her 39th birthday.
She only came back to Sarawak once in 1980, a visit she barely remembers, but she keeps communication links with many of her cousins in Sarawak through the miracle of Facebook.
She has a daughter, Olympia, my only granddaughter, who Cynthia brought to Sarawak twice in the late nineties and who even learned enough Bidayuh to play with the kids in the kampung. She will be turning 17 soon and is planning to return to Sarawak again when she becomes 18.
As for me, with my contract with Unimas ended, I do occasional talks and seminars when called upon, which is far less frequently than I would like but I spend most of my time at the computer writing.
It is rather ironic that, although I have always wanted to be a published writer since I was in high school, I got my first book published by an established publisher only after I came to Sarawak.
While at Unimas I published three books, one for employee career development, one for supervisors in doing performance appraisal and one for students graduating and entering the job market. These books were published by the Malaysian division of Marshall Cavendish publishers and distributed mostly in Malaysia and Singapore. Since leaving Unimas I have published five books by an American book publisher.
And so it keeps coming around. Almost every week, while shopping or running errands in Serian town, I come across another student of mine from one of my Form 3 or Form 2 classes. I often fail to remember either their names or faces because much water has passed under the bridge of my memories. But they all seem to remember the tall, dark American who taught them history, geography or English and drilled them on how to pass their Form 3 examination.
Bill Hughes can be contacted at [email protected] or [email protected].