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A swampy school in Sabah

During our recent visit to Goducate’s Sabah Literacy Centers, we crossed little rivers, climbed little hills, hiked slippery muddy tracks and “crawled” under a fence to get to the different centers. However, the most memorable visit was to the literacy center that was built on a swamp.

This community had earlier lived at the edge of the swamp (or fairly dry ground) nearer the road. However, as the area along the road was acquired by a developer who started building nice two-storey shop-houses for sale, they were forced to move into the swamp. I am not sure of the details of what happened, but it appears to me that their houses near the road were destroyed – leaving only the stumps on which those houses stood in the past. I was told that their houses were an “eye-sore” and a hindrance to value of the new shop-houses.

As we walked from the main road to the school-house, we passed what appeared like a “ghost town” of house-posts sticking out of the swampy ground. These people had salvaged the rest of their former houses (the walls, floor boards, roofings) and carried all this into the swamp and rebuilt houses right over the swamp. Today, the school-house built by the community stands proudly in the midst of the kampong – right over swampy ground.

The water level under the school-house depends on the tide. As we were walking to the school-house, our guide told us that we were lucky because just an hour before we came the water was about 65 cm deep!

We tried our best to keep our shoes dry by stepping on planks and stones but as we arrived at the school-house to attend the “welcome ceremony” from the eager students, we were ushered to our seats which were placed on the watery ground. For most of us, it was the first time we had sat through a school concert with our shoes in swampy water.

I was so proud of our Goducate students as they “showed off” what they had learned in the past 6 weeks. My heart was rejoicing, in spite of my concern for my “Ecco” shoes that were soaking in swamp water.

Swamp or no swamp, Goducate wants to help Asians help themselves!

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Carrying a precious cargo of text books to Sabah Literacy Centers

On our recent trip to Sabah, the twelve members of our team carried a precious cargo of donated text books for our literacy centers. Each one was assigned to carry the maximum load allowed by the budget airline. These were no ordinary books for recreational reading but were brand new “outdated” editions of text books donated by PanPac Educational publishers of Singapore.

When our Goducate staff opened the bags of books, they were so excited that they spent hours “checking out” the books. The verdict: “This is a treasure. Let’s start a primary school for the kids!”

For the past year and a half, Goducate has been busy getting literacy and numeracy into the kampongs, but it is definitely time to move on to giving the kids more than just literacy and numeracy.

Within 4 days of receiving the books, our staff had submitted a plan to start a Pilot Primary 1 to Primary 3 program for our 1st kampong center. It was a simple plan that involved training the capable local teachers (mostly mothers of the students) to use the text books to teach. The only bottle-neck to this plan is a sufficient supply of textbooks. The total number of children enrolled in Sabah Goducate centers already number over 1000.

Let’s hope that we can get other kind publishers and donors to supply more precious cargo, so that Goducate can help Asians help themselves.

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Sabah Learning Centers change entire communities

Each time I visit our Sabah learning centers, I’m not only impressed with the transformation of the students but also with how entire communities are transformed.

The most marked change is seen in the community where we started our first learning center (for reasons of security, I will just call our centers by numbers rather than by their names). Two years ago, when I first visited this village it was filthy. There was garbage everywhere. And as I walked through the village, I saw ladies gambling in the verandahs of their broken down houses and unruly filthy children playing in the dirt. The people looked at me in silence and suspicion. I was probably the first foreigner to visit their community.

Last week, as I entered the village, it was as if I had entered the wrong village. The village was clean and tidy. The filthy playground was now totally cemented with nice basketball posts at either end. In that playground was the bright red school house. Around the playground, some of the houses that used to be gambling dens are now used for “spillover classrooms.” This time I saw no evidence of gambling. Some of the gambling den operators are now teachers. In fact, the principal of this 1st center used to be a lottery seller.

As I stood outside one of the classrooms and saw the little slippers of the school kids neatly placed outside, I realized that these little kids had learned the precious lesson of discipline. As I entered the neat tidy classroom and saw the kids diligently writing on their little desks, I bent over to take a closer look at their penmanship and then I heard my fellow-visitor say to me “Their writing is better than ours!”

I could hardly contain my emotions as I thought how this little Goducate learning center had changed an entire community!