Singapore Sights

A few weekends ago, we had our third and final volunteer retreat. We headed to the small city country of Singapore to enjoy a few short days of sights and fellowship.

Singapore is definitely different than any place I've experienced in Asia thus far. Past the normal exclamations about Singapore (the organization of the city, the cleanliness, the laws forbidding chewing gum), I found myself adding new ones, being thrown off by a nice bathroom or when someone struck up a conversation with me in English. Overall, I think our group was a bit overwhelmed in the vast differences in a country just a few hours plane ride from our own. I think that it may have been a good thing to have had this retreat last, to remind us, however difficult, of the Western lifestyle that we left behind and will be returning to.

Singapore has a considerable arts scene, and is a city that is being built up by the day. We stayed with hosts with the Presbyterian church, and as always, enjoyed time together and exploring a new place.

Singapore skyline at night.

If you look closely, you can see the merlion statue (mermaid + lion)

spitting water-- the mascot of Singapore.

The infamous Esplanade theater.

Some say it is more famous (and beautiful) than the Sydney Opera house, though I agree with the critics who claim it is modeled after a durian.

A street arts festival, showcasing a fire exhibit. It was really amazing.

We also had the chance to go to the Singapore Zoo.

It's world famous because it doesn't use cages for its animals.

Exhibit A.

I learned that White tigers now only exist in zoos.

A historical section of town, Emerald Hill, with Chinese baroque architecture.

climbing adventures

This past week we had the opportunity to climb Mt. Kinabalu, the highest mountain in SE Asia. It was a two-day climb, a total of 9 kilometers if you make it all the way to the summit. It was steep! A tough adventure, to say the least. But it was beautiful!

The mountain

Part of the trail

The impressive porters

11,000 feet-- where we stopped for the night

Brrrr! It was COLD!

In the clouds

The summit!

A Sunday Ride

Our Sunday plans often vary, but today we walked down to the Anglican church, then hit up the large Chinese market on the way home. After two hours of church, an hour at the market, and a sidetrack for an impromptu brunch of teh tarik and pau, we started making the sweaty trek home.

From downtown up to the seminary campus you have two options. Either a grueling 5 minute cardio up a steep and unlevel jungle hill, or a leisure 20 minute walk on the road. It’s always a toss-up; up the shortcut for more sweat? Or the scenic route with the unpredictable dogs and cars?

Every once in a while though, we run into a friend with a car. Today was one of those days.

As the car slowed down, creeping next to us, I felt my frustration rise. I was about ready to roll my eyes and say to Kels, “Really? Can’t they just let us walk home in peace?” when she looked in the car and found not young gawking Malay men full of catcalls, but the gardener from STS.

My relationship with the gardener is based on friendly greetings. Each day we exchange a smile and a selamat pagi. But he’s a quiet guy, I’m the quiet orangputih, and our work doesn’t exactly cross paths.

We slip into the car, unsure of where to begin the conversation. He’s with his wife, whom I've never met; a few small shopping bags slide on the back seat, some black jeans slipping out of one of the bags.

“Kamu pergi di geraja?” I fumble and ask, already knowing my question is incorrect.

I stumble through my Malay as we have our first official conversation. Did you go to church? Yes, and the morning market. PCS church? No, Anglican. You are Anglican? No, I’m Lutheran.

The wife speaks faster. Maybe my Malay is sufficient enough that she assumes I can speak… I surprise myself in being able to answer and understand most of it.

Did you learn Malay at STS?

I laugh, and reply, “Tidak belajar... Not learn.”

We silently pull into the drive. “Kamu tinggal di sana?” Yes, we live over there.

An exchange of termia kasihs and we were on our way, but I couldn't stop thinking about the brief exchange that had just occured.

He doesn’t know me well, and he could have easily not given us a ride. But in the few minutes it took to drive up the winding road to the seminary, I felt surrounded in the love and friendliness found in a small gesture of kindness, in the most unexpected of places.

The Sounds of Malaysia

Close your eyes and listen.

Hear

The constant whirring of the fan

The bright chirp of the birds outside

The rumble of a truck pulling into the driveway

The stale breeze rustling through the palms

The drone of the planes consistently taking off for foreign countries

Hear the clinking of chopsticks in a bowl, the mixture of languages.

The wind is blowing your way, the faint call to prayer echos from the city below.

In the morning, you wake to roosters, construction, car alarms, and shouts in Malay.

The rain blares, the water rushes through the make-shift gutters, the frogs form their chorus.

The incessant honking cues you—it’s time to do your shopping, before the truck pulls away and you have to walk into town.

Singing fills the hallways of the seminary. Top hits? You raise me up, The Prayer, Amazing Grace, and the Hallelujah Chorus.

The market sellers sing their products. Eventually, you buy the best products with your ears, not your eyes.

Walking through the mall and the stalls, the shopkeepers sing to themselves, keeping company. You catch their eyes, but they smile, unembarrassed, and continue their song.

On the street, you hear motorbikes, buses, phone conversations, and kids on the street, strategically avoiding the questions of “taxi?” and “hello, ma!”

In the evenings, when the construction has died down, you sit back and listen to the families below. Hidden from sight in a tangle of jungle vegetation, the sounds of clanging pots cooking dinner over a fire, children crying and playing, and beats of loud music from their shanty homes rise through the window.

As you lay down to sleep, the eerie calm is broken by cat fights and dogs howling. Every so often the morning call to prayer pierces through the night stillness, alerting you in the darkness. The roosters start early, cuing your internal clock-- it beats your alarm every time.

gotong royong

The new building from my apartment window

STS has been in the process of building a new education center, and the big day is finally here. This Saturday is the opening celebration for the building. I'm grateful for this for a variety of reasons, but mostly so I can sleep at night and have a limited amount of dust to clean up in my apartment.

Somehow, I'm not quite sure how, the building is almost ready. It's a huge building, including an auditorium, two floors of classrooms, a sports court, a two-floor library, and a whole floor of apartments to my knowledge.

Gotong Royong is a Malaysian concept, roughly translated into "mutual assistance." More directly, it often refers to the idea of "many hands make light work." These last two days have been a big gotong royong for the new building, so all the students, faculty, and staff have been cleaning.

Malaysians are thorough cleaners. I don't quite know how else to put it. We cleaned anything and everything. I've swept out parking garages, wiped down auditorium chairs, scraped cement off window frames, dug out sewers, and, my personal favorite, washed out the parking ramp. I felt pretty Malaysian yesterday with my face mask on and a towel draped over my head-- a look I hope to pull off when I clean in the States. Though I don't think I'll ever be so adjusted that I also wear long sleeves, pants, and socks to avoid the sun.

Through it all, the concept of gotong royong shown true. I've been loving every minute of community as we cleaned, and the laid back personalities led to lots of singing and practical jokes.

The rest of this week is filled with late-night choir rehearsals and cleaning my own apartment as we gear up for this weekend. Maybe I can convince everyone to do a gotong royong for me!

what's in a name

“When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). John 19: 14-16

Names are a powerful thing. This is evident in John, when Mary does not recognize Jesus until he calls her by name. This has always struck me—the power that is held in our name, and the identity it tightly carries.

Before coming to Malaysia I was introduced to a wonderful poem. One line really struck me--

Continue to call each other by the names I've given you, to help remember who you are.
You will get where you are going by remembering who you are.

Why would I need to keep hearing my name, to have people call me by my name?
How could I forget who I am?

We heard a lot in orientation about losing our identities within the culture. For example, we needed to be prepared that everything we had done in our lives up to this point may have no meaning in our new country. Try telling this to 50 recent college grads who have been building up their resumes for four years or more. Nevertheless, I tried to mentally prepare myself to shed the identities that had defined who I was.

When we first got to Malaysia, it seemed instead as if we were given an overarching identity to keep all of us orangputih straight. Hi, please meet Jacob, the only boy and trumpet player, this is Erika, the basketball player, this is Ellen, the ballet dancer. My whole life was boiled down to one talent that people could remember me by upon first meeting. Luckily, these identities eventually faded (and people forgot I could perform) as we got to know people and created our own communities.

Not much later on in my time here, I had another frustrating identity experience through a dinner conversation. The man sitting next to me wanted to know what my hobbies were, what I did for exercise.
“Do you jog?” he asked.
“No, I’m not really a runner,” I replied.
“Well, then you don’t exercise?”
“No, I do,” I assured him.
Knowing that I didn’t want to explain my occasional routine of Pilates or an elliptical machine back in the States, I just stated that I used to dance.
“Oh, so you’re not active,” he concluded.
We circled around in conversation as he continued to state that I did nothing, and I kept trying to describe that yes, I did many things. The problem was in the translation. Everything I had ever done (dance, theater, choir) didn’t have a meaningful translation here, and at the end of the meal, I had resigned to this man thinking I was lazy because I wasn’t a runner and didn’t play ping pong.

At orientation we also had made a list of everything we were, how we defined ourselves. On my note card I began to list-- daughter, sister, friend, problem solver, advice giver… and so on. This activity came to my mind again the other day as I thought of my new identity.

Like water seeping through the cracks in the pavement, I have slowly formed an identity here. I still remember the first day someone approached me for an English related task and the excitement I felt— I finally had a purpose, something I did, something someone saw me as! Over time, I have become an English teacher, a support system, a friend to sit next to, a listener here.

I think roles that give us an identity and a sense of purpose are an innate need. And while I'm eager to discuss my duties here, or my new-found hobbies, I’m still drawn to the identity that lies within my name.

Jesus called Mary by name. Before that point, she did not recognize him.

Being called by name is so personal. Just one word is filled with a breadth of emotions—in requests, excitement, sadness, anger, gratitude.

I remember back to my student teaching, it took me forever to not only answer to Miss Hilger, but to take it on as my own identity.

In Malaysia, my name is Teacher. Miss Ellen. Sama Ellen. Miss. Sayama. Laoshi. Chikgu. Jiejie.

The funny thing about names is they are rarely given to us by ourselves. Other people, through time, create the identity within us.

I realized today that I am afraid to lose these names. Afraid that after this year, I will never hear a subdued voice, inquiring, “Sama Ellen? Teacher?"

the funny nuances

After having been in Malaysia a while, I've gotten used to the things that seemed a bit peculiar at first-- things like wiping off all your silverware at a restaurant, drinking certain drinks for the perfect cure, or putting anything and everything in a small plastic bag (my favorite is when you order a fountain drink and it comes in a plastic bag). Though this week, I was surprised once again (though I really shouldn't have been), and wanted to jot it down.

In family group on Tuesdays, we always have fellowship and eat snacks at the end. This time somebody brought Mamee, which are noodles in a little packet, like Ramen. We weren't having noodles to eat though-- instead everyone just crunched up the noodles in the packet, added the seasoning, and ate them like chips. I still laugh when I think about it. Luckily, they were BBQ flavoured!

And another anecdote from my night class...

Today we were reviewing the present perfect tense, eliciting sentencing about a pilot. I had given each student a key word, and they were to use the word correctly in the tense to talk about the pilot. For example, "The pilot has worked for the airport since 2008," or "The pilot has flown to over 20 countries." And so on.

It's one student's turn, and he writes, "I have not yet written my thesis."

The class gives a collective, "huh? it's supposed to be about the pilot!"

"Ohhh, the subject is the pilot?"

He then proceeds to change his writing to read, "The pilot has not yet written his thesis."

At this point, we all were crying with laughter, because we didn't want to ride in that plane!