AS you read this, you have a long holiday to look forward to – amidst a celebration, steeped in indigenious cultures and traditions, to mark the grand harvesting seasons of the Dayaks and Kadazans in Sarawak and Sabah respectively.
When I was a child, this would be a season where people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories.
My father had two elder brothers who both stayed in the town. But my granduncle (grandfather’s brother) had 11 children, most of whom stayed in my village.
So my mother had many cousins-in-law whom I called aunties, staying next to each other.
For them, sitting around the table, telling stories was not a way to pass time.
The aunties were hard-working women. Besides the daily chores of cooking and cleaning, they had rubber trees to tap, vegetable and pepper gardens to look after, poultry to rear and even some pigs to bathe! Yes, the porcine species did enjoy the cool luxury of a daily soaking!
But it was the way the aunties unwound after a hard day’s work that I find most educational and inspirational. I love listening to stories. To a young mind, it was the way the wisdom got passed along.
The aunties repeated the stories over and over, and each time, the stories gave me a different perspective and understanding. Their wisdom and virtues are worth treasuring a life time.
Now, we read stories, we hear them over the radio or TV or watch them on Youtube. Someone writes the stories and thespians act them out. It can be wonderful but it can never bring out that same kind of old, familiar feeling.
It was at mid-week that this young reporter whatsapped me: Madam, I think I have an exclusive story.
A scoop? He did not sound very sure though or he was just being reserved but he is always very “loud” (he speaks loudly).
No matter. An exclusive is music to the ears of editors … anytime.
According to the reporter’s story, some smart contractor built a “temporary bridge” across Tebat River with a clearance too low for the residents to pass under in their longboats to get to their farms.
Some got around the problem by using two boats – one on each side of the bridge – but this “ingenuity” carried a dual risk – the longboats could either be swept away by floods or get stolen.
The other method is to “sink” their longboats in the water so that they can pass under the bridge – in lieu of the next best thing – the availablity of a submarine!
As for their goods and harvested crops, the farmers could load and unload them on the main road.
The young reporter had the chance to see what was actually happening on the spot and tell his story accordingly.
The editors, on the other hand, had to imagine and figure out how hard life must be for the Tebat farmers.
As one Owen Braoh aptly puts it: “That, if done everyday, is very frustrating.”
For two years, that has been a way of life for 20 families in five longhouses in the Tebat area. They have no other place to farm other than on their land by Ulu Skrang River. After two long years of knocking on every door, pleading with their headman, and hunting for the contractor, they finally decided to tell their sad story to a reporter.
These farmers are kind simple folks. Although they have thought of dismantling the bridge, they realised that doing so would cut their community in Tebat off from the outside world.
Just last Sunday, the people in the Central Region assembled at the Lanang Bridge to cheer the scrapping of toll for the bridge but for the people of Tebat, they can only look back to what might and should have been: “When we first heard about a road being built here years ago, we were delighted as we could now travel in and out of Ulu Skrang with ease.
“Now that the road is almost completed, we hope the road builders will take time to consider the people of Tebat as it have been nearly two years of suffering for us.”
Someone in authority has boasted audaciously: “A simple bridge will not take long to build.”
But it has been a lengthy two-year wait – and counting – for the longhouse folk at Tebat.
I wonder how their story would have been told around my mama’s kitchen table. But this I know for sure – it would have a level playing field as everyone’s story mattered.
Despite their predicament, I am sure the kind folks of Tebat will still have a reason to rejoice during this Gawai season – even if it means climbing up and down the “bridge” to celebrate with their kin and friends – hopefully just for now.
After all, the authority and the YB concerned have promised them a real bridge with a clearance high enough to let a longboat to pass under with ease.
To me, the “too low for comfort” bridge story is one about rural people having to put up with what senseless contractors have built for them; how they must have felt, thought and feared. And hearteningly, through the story, I have discovered who and how lucky I am.
In Kitchen Table Wisdom, author Rachel Naomi Remen wrote:
“Real stories take time. We stopped telling stories when we started to lose that sort of time, pausing time, reflecting time, wondering time. Life rushes us along and few people are strong enough to stop on their own.
“Most often, something unforeseen stops us and it is only then we have the time to take a seat at life’s kitchen table. To know our own story and tell it. To listen to other people’s stories. To remember that the real world is made of just such stories.
“Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognise meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants.”
For the long holiday, I am going to read more stories, tell more stories, listen to more stories and will especially let this bridge story dissolve slowly into my life and store it carefully for a dark time when the going gets tough!