Brief communications: a letter from Lundu.

10 February 2005

Rain. Wisdom has it that Chinese New Year is always wet. Yesterday when the new moon rose with the sun we enjoyed surprise dry weather, a cool, breezy day with decorative baroque-dessert clouds. This second day tradition holds and with the anak bulan the sky lowers and drops showers at random.

During last year's holidays the rain came down without stop for ten days. Sarawak was flooded and Lundu was cut off from Kuching. The Batang Kayan swelled; the ferries could not make way against the current, and the bridge at Kampong Bukah lay covered by rushing water. The river must have risen 30 feet.

December 2004 soaked us through and through. Landas came early this year, and wouldn't let up. We celebrated two weddings here in Stunggang and the guests huddled under temporary zinc-roofed sheds and picked--or squelched--their way to the food. Life disappeared into houses. It was a great time to set traps for ikan keli, and the people going fishing were the only folks you saw outside. People had already set out their rice plants, and were willing to let them grow by themselves until the sun came out again. The towkays of Lundu bazaar had stacked all their stock on pallets and boxes, and were happy that the Christmas inundation missed them this year.

At Christmas, for whatever reason, the clouds clumped thicker, lower, and darker. The rain and the gloom were not unwelcome; Biak Mail said to me that he guessed that this was what snow-season felt like. Christmas in Lundu is innocent of the hype and commercialism that spoils it in cities. We don't give presents or send cards. We berami makai with the family. On Christmas eve the market is full of people, and they are all buying food. Dinner follows the service, and the church is packed. The scene is more Dickensian than one could hope to find in England. Dayaks don't understand religion without a party attached, and so they know exactly what to do with Christmas. It is the time for the women to show off their skills in baking cakes, and this year I sampled many good durian cakes from November's bumper crop.

The weather has been turning stranger and stranger with each year. Wet and dry alternate erratically, the climate is perceptibly hotter. The pattern that old people are used to is becoming less clear. My late mother-in-law noted this ten years ago and said "That's what you get when you cut down the trees." H'bi didn't know letters. She was an artist with mats, and she was nobody's fool.

Then, the day after Christmas, the tsunami. If this can come under a broad heading of "weather." Not a ripple reached Borneo. I was going through the Malay kampong to town, right by the river at high tide, and I would have seen something. My wife Nusi had some visitors in the afternoon and one spoke of a tsunami; we learned of the true appalling horror only on the 8 o'clock news. By now we know that 300,000 people were killed. We know who they were; they were just like us. At the time, nobody in Lundu had anything to say about the devastation and death--it was too big for words. I, too, couldn't say anything to anybody then, and I can't say anything now.

Otto Steinmayer

P. O. Box 13

94500 Lundu, Sarawak 

Malaysia