KOTA KINABALU, Sept 6 — There are a growing number of Sabah’s youngest rural population striving for an education to get out of the poverty trap their families have been stuck in for generation after generation.
The issues are many; not chiefly among them Sabah’s size and a population scattered by geography and by historical hamlets which have remained relatively cut off from larger towns and settlements.
Schools are built where there are masses; and those who live in the interiors find access hampered by hills, rivers and jungle tracks and gravelly roads which are not easily traversed.
There is at best unreliable public transport; but oft times, the residents of these remote areas have to walk hours to get to a point where they can take a bus or taxi. If they can afford it.
Few among them can afford a 4WD; few own motorcycles; and if they are living across rivers, they risk their lives crossing in rickety boats, especially during heavy rains.
Many years ago, perhaps in 2006, then minister of national unity, Datuk Seri Maximus Ongkili, asked if the ECM Libra Foundation could help build a hostel in Keningau for such students who stayed in the interiors in Tenom and surrounding areas.
The kids would stay in the hostels which were near schools and go back once a month or during long holidays to be with their family. That was the first we knew about this problem.
A few years later, an ex journalist friend, Datuk Joniston Bangkuai, asked if we could assist two La Sallian sisters who were running a similar hostel near Tamparuli for 40 girls who were barely surviving. His request was accompanied by a note on an exercise book paper, asking for RM10,000 for things such as sanitary pads, cream crackers, pencils, writing paper, sugar and cooking oil.
It intrigued me. How do you sustain and feed 40 girls for one year with these items which wouldn’t last two weeks?
We decided to visit the two sisters and see for ourselves.
They had a decrepit hut where the two sisters stayed and a slightly bigger building, perhaps a thousand square feet, which was divided into two areas — dining and study in one, and a bedroom with 20 bunk beds for the 40 kids.
They fed the kids with money from well wishers; had a vegetable patch and a small pond where they bred tilapia. Still, many days, the kids would go with at best two hardly nutritional meals per day.
We sat down with the sisters and I made a mistake which I will never repeat. I told the sisters, their written request in my hand, that I had seen the conditions.
We had already decided to do something for them but I was flippant. I said: “I have seen your request. I won’t give you 10 thousand ringgit.”
I will never forget the faces of the two sisters — they looked so shattered and almost in tears.
I apologised profusely and told them we would expand the hostel, build a computer room with proper books for a library and fund their operations for three years. We did that and what followed was more amazing.
I queried Joniston, who is now a senior government politician, over the years and he said public donations had increased once they saw how “outsiders” had helped.
The sisters have not asked for more donations and we hear they are still running the hostels. That’s the good part of this story.
Some months ago, we received a request for help from Jimmy Lei, a retired engineer who had migrated to Sydney, but came back — leaving his children and grandchildren in Australia — to help these Sabahans.
He started the Starfish Malaysia Foundation in 2014.
There’s a famous story about this.
One day, a man was walking along the beach when he noticed a boy picking something up and gently throwing it into the ocean.
Approaching the boy, he asked, “What are you doing?” The boy replied, “Throwing starfish back into the ocean. The surf is up and the tide is going out. If I don’t throw them back, they’ll die.”
“Son,” the man said, “don’t you realise there are miles and miles of beach and hundreds of starfish? You can’t make a difference!”
After listening politely, the boy bent down, picked up another starfish, and threw it back into the surf. Then, smiling at the man, he said, “I made a difference for that one.”
So that’s what Jimmy wants to do. He knows he can’t help everyone who needs help — but if he can help just a few, he’d have made a difference to their lives. For the better.
In the last 10 years, Jimmy has started five hostels in the poorest region in Malaysia — the area between Kota Marudu, Tandek, Pitas and Kota Belud.
These hostels, which house about 180 kids aged from 7 to 17, are nothing luxurious. Far from it.
The kids live 10 to a room (about less than 200 square feet) and sleep on five double bunk beds.
The gut wrenching part is that the young ones get to see their parents and siblings at best once a fortnight. And that’s going to be the pattern until they finish secondary school, or if they are lucky, university.
One kid, when we visited, kept coming to us to read him a story from a book. In the end, he sat on a stack of chairs by himself just flipping through the book. I guess he missed his parents.
And I thought: all this for the love of an education and for a desire to escape the poverty trap.
These kids have no choice. Their villages are at best a three-hour walk from the nearest school or worse, a two-day travel over hills, across rivers and treks over gravel or jungle roads.
Jimmy funds these hotels with the help of two retired Singapore lawyers married to Sabahans, a generous feed mill owner and his own funds and individual donors.
It’s sad that after 60 years of independence, there are still many extremely poor people in a resource rich state like Sabah.
The next day, after the back-breaking journey into the interior, we met Sister Dorothy Amelia Laudi.
I wondered: what drives people like Sister Dorothy, who has two Masters and a Bachelor’s degree in early education and child psychology, to give up her job as a lecturer, and devote her whole life, as she says, to “begging” so she can help educate the poorest of Sabahans in the deep interiors of the state?
Sister Dorothy runs six kindergartens in Tambunan, Pensiangan, Kota Marudu and Keningau for the poor — she says, the rural folk “know how to make children” — but most parents cannot afford the RM4 a month fee.
In her schools, she hires 12 locals who have some basic education and training, to teach the kids, gives them a meal everyday at 10am which probably lasts the whole day, but many of these kids have gone on to secondary school and a few to university. That’s the great part.
It’s a challenge though, as most of these villages have no electricity; water is pumped from rivers; and the kindergartens are built by the villagers themselves with materials sourced from the jungle or from donors. Many eventually get destroyed by termites.
Sister Dorothy has a wicked sense of humour. My colleague Lim Beng Choon and I felt embarrassed having asked her to meet us at our hotel in Kota Kinabalu.
It took her six hours traversing rivers, taking public transport and taxis to reach us. We took her for breakfast and she scraped every morsel of her wan tan mee “so I won’t be hungry going back.”
We were told about Sister Dorothy by Datuk Ong Eng Bin, a retired banker and my fellow Governor in Methodist Boys School, our alma mater, last year. It took us almost a year to synchronise the visit with her.
She funds the operations with money from individual donors and once in a while, from institutions.
If Malaysia needs to look for heroes, we don’t have to look far. There are many like Sister Dorothy in both the peninsula and Sabah and Sarawak. The ECM Libra Foundation has been working with some of them for the last 20 years. God bless them.
*Datuk Seri Kalimullah Hassan is chairman & co founder with Lim Kian Onn of the ECM Libra Foundation. You can follow him on Instagram @kalimullah to find out more about the foundation’s charitable projects.
