If you were in their shoes …

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Squatters here live next to tombstones.

WHEN you think of the billions of ringgit derived from the sales of oil and gas extracted from Sarawak’s soil since 1975, and when you look at a colony of squatters of Sarawakians living in tumbledown shacks next to a graveyard in Kuching City, you cannot help but wonder: who are rightful stakeholders of that wealth of the country? Why are some people what they are – dirt poor – in a resource-rich state with a small population? Mother of all ironies!

I’m referring to a colony of Sarawakian families, who have been living at the end of Chawan Road 13 for the past 30 years. If you have a weak heart, don’t go there – those people who believe in the existence of ghosts. This is a rare place where you can see the living and the dead co-existing in perfect harmony.

However, ghosts don’t deter a group of citizens who really care. Two socioeconomic studies carried out by a team of voluntary professional social scientists have revealed that scant attention has been paid by the local authorities to alleviate the conditions of the squatters other than the advice for them to leave the place and to relocate elsewhere.

That’s easier said than done. If you were in their shoes, where could you find land in Kuching on which to erect some shelter with a roof above your head, to secure employment, and to send your children to school?

Going back to where they had come from is not an option. The very fact that they decided to move out of their villages in the first place explains why they had to do with a space for the erection of timber shacks, while waiting for a better time to move to a home elsewhere. In the mean time they are squatting on land belonging to a non-governmental organisation.

To add insult to injury, recently some seven families of the squatters were issued with a writ to vacate the land owned by a company. Their shacks are alleged to have been built on such land. However, a survey of the perimeter pegs of the land belonging to a non-government organisation shows only a small portion of the roof of one miserable shack may be protruding above the land belonging to a company. The major portion of the offending structure is on land belonging to the NGO.

Two weeks ago, a machine was sent to the colony to pull down the building.

This is adding insult to injury. It is not the way to treat a poor squatter, who struggles to survive especially during the current Covid-19 pandemic. Where is common decency, I wonder?

Socioeconomic studies

This village has been adopted by the All Party Parliamentary Group, Malaysia, this year for the implementation of a poverty-eradication project of the United Nations Millennium Sustainable Development Goals (extended to 2030).

There are two such Solutions Projects in Sarawak. One is at the parliamentary constituency of YB Nancy Shukri, and the one at Jalan Chawan 13 is in the constituency of Kuching Bandar whose MP is YB Dr Kevin Yii – the coordinator.

The project at Chawan Road 13 has been going on since July this year and will end in February next year. The manager of Solutions Project 07 is the Sarawak Dayak Iban Association (Sadia), with which I have a long connection.

The two socioeconomic studies included personal interviews with 115 persons from 26 families, who had migrated from various districts (Singai in Bau, Taboon in Simunjan, Banting, Munggu Sawa, Abok Janang, Semayang, Menuang, Pantu, Kuruk, Stumbin, Lachau, and Engkeranji, at various times during the past 25 years or so).

They were hoping to find better employment in Kuching, and what they were thinking, would be better schools for their children. Like many migrants the world over, they want a better life, if not during their own life time, hopefully, at least, for that of their children. Hence the stress on education for their children. Under the programme called Solutions Project, the children are given tuition on subjects they are weak at, from the kindergarten level up to the secondary level, if funding is available.

The next phase of the programme involves small-scale income-generation projects. Equally important is the hearts and minds project based on the principle of ‘Give the man the rod, not the fish’ – promotion of self-esteem and the will to survive under trying circumstances.

The studies also reveal information on the state of their health, the number of sick and invalid persons. For this an emergency measure was taken last week by the manager of the project. A team of medical and health workers from the National Population and Family Development Board last week conducted health checks on the squatters, thanks to help from the office of the MP for the constituency.

The managers and the whole team from the APPGM-SDG appeal to the owners of the adjacent parcels of land to help reduce any anxiety among the participants of the APPGM-SDG programme.

For the past two weeks in October, the squatters were not only worried about loss of earnings as a result of closure of certain factories where they were working – no thanks to the movement restrictions imposed by the law against the spread of Covid-19 – but also the prospects of losing their homes for allegedly squatting on a company’s land.

Two of the squatters involved in the APPGM-SDG programme have been issued with a writ of summons to vacate the company’s land. A machine was sent to a house; the driver promised to come back to pull the house down! I was told about this. That caused considerable anxiety. Where can these poor people go?

The pandemic is bad enough for all of us. Don’t choose this time to make life even worse for the poorest of our fellow-citizens!

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