Nooraini (second right) kisses Sedi while other sisters celebrate her return.
Sedi (seated, third left), with (standing from second left) Coombs, Nooraini, Ellis (right) and others at a photograph session.
Sedi (third right) reunites with the people from her longhouse.
Sedi when working at a nunnery.
Sedi looks at photographs
of her parents.
SIBU: For half a century, folk at Rumah Buda, Tanah Putih in Sarikei have not heard from Sedi Ambang. One day, she just showed up at their door.
“Sedi is home!” the excited and shocked folks called out. For Sedi, it was a bittersweet homecoming as she experienced the warmth of a family for the first time in half a century.
It was also a reminder of her roots.
Sedi, now 70 years old and carrying a British citizenship under the name of Sedi Carpenter, left for Portsmouth, England when she was 17 in 1965.
She had married an Englishman, Kenneth Peter Packwood, a 23-year-old Royal Marine whom she met two years earlier in Sibu.
“Before he went home, he said to me ‘I don’t want to leave you here, I want to take you home’.
I couldn’t speak English and I only knew one word; I said ‘Yes’ and that was it,” she told reporters in an interview recently.
Her marriage with Kenneth was disapproved by her parents who insisted that she stay home and agree to an arranged marriage.
However, Sedi, who had always wanted an adventurous life, did not want the arranged marriage, fearing that she might marry an old man.
“I didn’t want the arranged marriage; I think it sounded silly. I wanted somebody I like and love to live with.
“My mother said ‘If you marry a foreigner, you get out from this house’. And that is what I did; I got married to a foreigner and I left home,” she said.
Her father did not know that she had left.
She got married on March 22, 1965 and left Sarawak in November that same year.
Her adventure had begun – a different kind of adventure especially when she was a foreigner and could not read and write.
She first experienced homesickness when she could not get up from bed for three months because it was freezing cold.
“Life in England, it was very hard. You can’t speak to people because nobody will understand you. Day-to-day, people do not want to help you, don’t want to know you, and nobody cares about you,” she said.
She was quite contented with her married life for nine years, after which their marriage went down.
Ten years through their marriage, the couple divorced.
“I started working when we were married, but he did not like it; he wanted me to stay at home. After our marriage had gone down, I said I wanted a divorce. I packed my bags and I walked away,” she said.
It was the first time she understood homelessness, homesickness, and hopelessness.
As soon as she walked away, she stayed with some students for three months, where she cooked and cleaned for them in exchange for food and bed.
After that, because she did not know how to get a flat and a place to stay, she sometimes slept at the factory where she worked and sometimes at the beach or any place she could find to sleep.
“Being homeless was horrible and hard and I got scared because no one there helped me and I just cried sometimes, and when I cried, people asked me ‘Why do you cry?’. I said ‘Well, I got no house to live in; I got no food to eat’. I went hungry many times,” she recalled.
At that most difficult time, she knew she just had to make her life work and she fought to stay alive.
“I started to knock on people’s doors. I asked for work. I could do gardening, I could clean, I could look after babies. I told them ‘I do not want the money, as long as I can have food’,” she said.
However, eventually, when she could speak English, she said she started to work for money.
She said it took her about 35 years to speak proper English.
Although life seemed hard, England was good to her because she could learn skills such as cooking and reading.
She hardly had time to sleep as she worked several jobs a day. Eventually, she earned enough money to buy herself a two-bedroom house.
She said it took her 18 years to pay for the house.
She said she got married again in 1978, but that marriage only lasted for about five years. That was how she got her name Sedi Carpenter.
Sedi has no family in England and was quite lonely at times.
“Life in England is sometimes sad, because I got no one to talk to, for days, months and years and not even telephone. I got a dog, a guinea pig and a hamster and that kept me busy and then, I got a little garden. That kept me happy, but sometimes it was just not enough. I needed more,” she said.
For all these years, she had been thinking of coming back to Sarawak to see her family again, but she did not know how.
At the age of 60, after her retirement, she saved enough money to book a ticket home, but let it go instead because she was scared to travel alone.
“That dream for adventure came again, but fear of travelling alone paralysed me, so it did not work out that time,” she said.
Ten years later, at the age of 70, she decided to do it again and she got help from her former colleague Anne Coombs.
Coombs and her daughter Susan Ellis agreed to travel with Sedi. It was Sedi’s first time stepping outside England.
On Oct 11, they arrived in Sibu with the hope of finding the longhouse that Sedi used to live in.
Ellis said everything only came together on Oct 18 through the help of a staff of the Visitor Information Centre (VIC) at Sibu Heritage Centre.
The search was conducted purely based on Sedi’s memory. All she remembered was that her longhouse was situated in a place called Tanah Putih and the longhouse was just beside the Rajang River.
A travel guide, Fiona Tiong who was assigned to pick them up from the airport, was again assigned to help in the mission.
“I Googled and I found SK Tanah Putih. We decided to drive and I used my GPS to search for it. I asked the local people there and more than one hour later, we found the longhouse,” Tiong said.
When the longhouse folks realised that it was Sedi, it was an emotional reunion.
Ellis said it was lucky for Sedi that she had her wedding certificate that had her original name on it.
“Since Wednesday, we have all these family members coming.
It’s been good; a bit overwhelming for Sedi because she tried to take it all in because she got no family in England at all and now she got lots.
“We wanted her to find her family but we never thought for one minute we would see her family, so that is an added bonus. I didn’t think it was possible,” she said.
From the longhouse, the news of her return spread to her siblings.
One of her sisters, Nooraini Abdullah @ Mit Ambang, 57, who had been praying for her return, received news from her cousin.
“I was having my breakfast and when I heard the news, I stopped eating and I just cried. I could not contain my happiness. Too overwhelming,” she said, adding that she was only three years old when Sedi left.
According to Nooraini, their parents, Ambang Sumok and Belula Bayau, died broken hearted awaiting Sedi’s return.
She said they kept talking about her and tried lots of ways to find her.
However, as the family was poor, no one knew how to find Sedi.
“I remember my mother kept talking about her and she cried whenever she thought of her
until the day she died, and my father as well died of a broken heart,” she said.
When Sedi heard what had happened to her parents, she said she regretted not coming home earlier.
“I am very sad to know that. Thinking about it, yes, I feel regret but it is just too late now,” she said.
However, she believes it is important to make new memories with her family.
Last week, she managed to meet with her four sisters who came to Sibu to meet her.
For her, meeting her siblings the first time was a nervous experience.
She said coming home reminded her of how life used to be.
“I have not spoken Iban for over 50 years and listening to the language again makes me happy; it reminds me of how life used to be. To meet them again was a little bit exciting, a little sad but it is a happy life now,” she said.
She said she had to relearn the language as she could not understand Iban anymore, and also learn their tradition and culture.
It was because of her determination that she was able to find her family.
“I told myself, I must find them. Just like I have the desire to live, I got a power to do things. I have the energy to live. If I didn’t do what I did, I would be just hanging around and I am quite proud of myself,” she said.
Asked what she wanted to do next, she said her sisters wanted her to apply for Malaysian citizenship and stay in Sarawak for good.
However, she had yet to make up her mind. She said she would try to apply for Malaysian citizenship when she comes back again.
“I can’t decide whether to come back or stay there (England) because of the pension. If I can’t have my pension here, then I can’t stay because I need money and I can’t get a job anymore because I am old,” she said.
On Oct 23, she left Sibu for England, taking a photograph of her parents with her as remembrance.