Another week over!

  The Primary school calendar in Sabah I'm sure does hold some more surprises for me but I'm beginning to be very accepting when yet another approaching event is declared. Last week was the chess tournament and February seemed to be athletics and sports. This week has been the start of fervent rehearsals for the zone competitions at the beginning of April. The pupils that are chosen to represent the schools are allowed, with the teachers responsible for the event, to practise for 2 hours after recess, until the competition. The other pupils seem to just drift around and no one appears to be in any trouble or bothered by the lack of supervision. The rehearsals that so far that I've seen have been for; choir, karaoke style singing, Dusun dancing, Action songs in English, Choral speaking in English ( a very strange chanting with a conductor) storytelling, traditional gongs and I expect there are more that I haven't seen yet. It seems that everywhere around the school there are little groups of pupils  rehearsing with music, gongs, singing, chanting all competing with one another! This week I managed to press gang some trainee teachers who were observing for a week, to help me start to paint and decorate a Year 1's classroom. My aim is to try and brighten up the Year 1's classrooms to start with and introduce a reading corner with books that they can touch!



Painting in satin!



Action song rehearsal

  The rice harvest has begun! Some of the rice plants have really started to ripen and turn an amber colour and just in the last week some of the people have been out starting to harvest. The rice is cut into bundles and then carried to a sort of makeshift tent made out of bamboo and tarpaulins. It is there that someone threshes the bundles to separate the grains. As to what happens with the dried stems I'm not sure yet but will continue to watch with interest.



Gen is in the air as I write and tomorrow I will meet her at Kota Kinabalu airport!!

Simpang Mengayau



The Tip of Borneo

    Yesterday was the patron saint's day of our son and of my homeland and I'm quite sure that Saint Patrick would be astounded to think that it was celebrated so worldwide and in ways that he could never have imagined. After leaving Andrew at the airport yesterday I stayed on in KK and went out with a few friends.We called in briefly towards the end of the evening to the big Saint Patrick celebration and by that time there were many tourists and locals wearing those tall green hats, that I have yet to see in Ireland, and having a very "merry" time. We were in time to see the Irish dancing which was performed by local Sabahans called- guess? - yes River Dance -wearing green costumes and doing a very good attempt, apart from some odd angled twists to the legs. The next item was "traditional" music again played by local musicians playing the clarinet, electric guitar and piano. At this stage I decided to go home! All I can remember when I was growing up in Northern Ireland was having a day off school and going to watch the School's Rugby Cup Final. I have a vague recollection of someone making green jelly once but not much else. In the collection of  war letters written mostly by my father there are some that were written by my mother and were returned to sender and never opened or read. I have read a few and in one dated 17th March 1942, only a month after the Fall of Singapore, I found a little dried bunch of shamrocks that my mother had worn all day just praying and hoping that my father was still alive. It was many months before she knew that he had been captured and to read it is heart wrenching. Does the tradition of wearing shamrocks continue I wonder or has green dye, tall hats and beer taken over?

The green crested lizard  in my garden.

   Andrew and I had a lovely few days this week at the Tip of Borneo, Simpang Mengayau,and the beach there was absolutely beautiful and nearly deserted. There are many islands just off the Tip that have caused much strife historically often between Sabah and the Philippines, not to mention the Dutch, Spanish, British and just plain old pirates. In 1881 the chief of the Rungus tribe asked for help from the British against marauding pirates and then in 1882 the British North Company was established on Pulau Banggi which gave the British the foothold to claim North Borneo as theirs in 1888. The Rungus tribe are famous for their bead work and living in longhouses which are still evident today. As we looked out from the Tip where the South China Sea and the Sulu Sea merge, we were saying that we could not have predicted in a million years that we would have been sitting doing this, this time last March.

 Andrew has now left for Mongolia and has left a small pile of his shorts, t-shirt and flip-flops while cramming his suitcase full of snow boots and a very thick coat ready for minus temperatures! What or where next I wonder?

Ranau's Got Talent!

A man who did participate!

    This has been a busy week for Emily and I as we were the J.U 's, (don't know what it means in Malay but it means presenters) at the Ranau District Year 1 training for the new English curriculum. I was phoned on Sunday and told that I had been put down for a 2 hour slot on Monday on pronunciation ( being a native speaker!) Not exactly a very light subject to engage 74 teachers in with less than 12 hours notice on the first morning! I did cause a stir about the pronunciation of /a/ [ae] and came armed with a video from the BBC Learning English Site but I'm not sure anyone was convinced! Anyway, all of us were thrown together for 4 days from 8 a.m until 5 pm and despite the attendance being less in the afternoons on the whole most of the teachers stayed and it was good fun and gave us an opportunity of meeting some great teachers. The social interaction was interesting - the men all sat at the back and were very loathe to join up with any of the ladies. When we forced the men into groups with the ladies they literally left all the work to them and then took the microphone when it was time to do a presentation. So I asked everyone " Is it always like this - the women do the work and men do nothing?" Apparently that was quite a bold thing to say but the women were pleased and the men just thought I was a bossy orang putih and continued to do as little as possible!
  It was held in the new District Offices which are very smart with marble floors, doormen in uniform and red berets who greeted us.The course was held in a huge conference room with an oval table and microphones that lit up when you spoke with very comfortable swivel chairs. We were all provided with a snack at 10.30 and then lunch at 12.30 and being the J.U's we were served ours in a separate room! The most surreal time for me was on the last afternoon when we were asked to comment and evaluate the lessons and lesson plans of each group.(I know the irony of it struck me too!) I felt I was on Britain's got Talent and everyone seemed to hang on our words and clapped if we thought it was good! I tried to say something nice about them all but sometimes it was very difficult and then there were moments where I just couldn't praise the teachers enough - they were fantastic.

 So you and I know that I'm no V.I.P. and I keep thinking I'm going to be found out as a fraud. Andrew also

has been having some strange VIP moments in Myanmar and in KL last week . When he told one of his colleagues that he used to be a cleaner and gardener for 9 years they just didn't believe him. Do V.I.P.'s really think they are important or are we all just pretending?

Zdravstvujtye and Guten Tag to you all

      Lisa showed me at Christmas how to look at statistics on my blog and I can't tell you how surprised I am to know that so many of you are reading it. Today I checked again and I have had 4,147 views since I began in July 2011. For someone like me who is not into statistics, I still find it amazing that so much information can be collected. The majority of you are from U.K. and France but I appear to have a small following in Germany, Russia and Singapore! Last Friday I met my new manager and when he asked me to tell him about myself I proceeded to say that I lived in France and had 5 children and he said " Oh you are Fiona in Borneo!" It sounds like some sort of title doesn't it - Clive of India, Lawrence of Arabia!? The other thing that you can tell is what you read most and Andrew was amused to see that Andrew in Borneo had only a few views so we have decided NOT to put Andrew in Borneo Part 2 and go for a more catchy title!

A chat among the rice sacks in Ranau

A red attempt to stop the birds eating the rice.

   I have had a busy week at school and Andrew has been busy doing his reports at "home" so we haven't done anything extraordinary this week although it has been very nice having him around. It was pay day on Tuesday and I bought a desk and office chair and now can play at being "in my office". We've eaten most evenings in Ranau and then sat on my lovely terrace. Yesterday we went up to Mount Kinabalu Park for a walk and treated ourselves to a sandwich in a posh hotel. Today he is off again but only to Kuala Lumpur for a few days before he returns to Ranau on Friday. So thank you all you bloggers for reading or just looking at the photos - I am very surprised and will do my best to keep it interesting.



Mount Kinabalu again!



A water buffalo enjoying a swim.