Gong Xi Fa Cai

        So welcome to the Year of the Dragon. There have been many firecrackers, fireworks, and gonging going on throughout the week and I managed to see the end of a lion dance. Most shops have opened again except for some of the Chinese community and most things are back to normal now. So when is the next festival to celebrate I ask? Well there is Mohammed’s birthday coming up next weekend and I think we have at least one day off for that!

         My house is beginning to look and feel more like home and on Friday I bought some chairs and cooked my first meal on my gas cooker. There seems to be so much to buy when you start from nothing but at the moment with just me, I am trying to lead a simple life and get by with the bare minimum. Those who know how full my cupboards are at home in France with many plates may well be astonished by this news!
   On Saturday  I went down the mountain and stayed with a friend in Tuaran which is a town on the coast, north of Kota Kinabalu. There are beautiful beaches and mangrove swamps and lagoons that you can’t see from the road and on Sunday we visited the water village that one of the mentors has a school at. The village had been there for many years and the people were all from the ethnic group of the bajau who are often known as the sea gypsies. Many originally came from the islands that belong or belonged to the Philippines and they are people who are renowned for their fishing and marine skills as well their horsemanship. The water village, to me as a tourist, of course looked very picturesque and charming. There were ladies paddling canoes full of buckets of drinking water and some of the men were fishing and collecting the oysters from the mangroves.

There were all different sizes of houses and some in very good repair and others tilted precariously at an angle; some were made of wood and others were small shacks made of corrugated iron. It was like any other village except of course the reality being that there is no running water or sanitation and only a few with electricity. We turned the corner and there was a huge housing estate of 1000 identical houses being built by the government in order to rehouse the people in the village. There were already some houses occupied and people from outside the water village were being housed there too. We talked to one of the villagers who spoke about his fear of  losing the traditional way of life that they had always had in the village. In developing countries and of course in Western countries too progress is measured by housing with electricity and sanitation but I left the village feeling sad that progress meant that this way of life perhaps will disappear for these people before too long.