orang asli – forgotten and marginalised

when one of malaysiakini’s merdeka special highlighted the forgotten people – the orang asli of the jahai tribe , i can relate to the story  (what the orang asli disclosed i mean) very well as i myself had heard straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak of another orang asli tribe, the temiar, which incidentally malaysiakini had mentioned that the jahai and the temiar are the two main orang asli group in the belum forest in hulu perak. i get to hear from the temiar during the interview of marginalised people as i had mentioned here. although my group interviewed the estate workers, we all get together after the interview to present our report and from there, when it came to the orang asli report, questions were thrown to the floor and that was the time i heard the temiar orang asli spoke up. of course some of what they spoke up are unprintable (you know lah why), thus i had only a short report of them.

(picture here shows the children of jahai, taken from malaysiakini)

ok i am going to highlight some excerpts from the malaysiakini report with my comments. sorry, this time i won’t be posting the whole article to my mentaljog extra for you to read as it won’t be fair to malaysiakini if i do it everytime. you are encourage to subsribe to malaysiakini to be able to read all those interesting news and articles. beside, you’ll be supporting malaysiakini to keep providing us with good alternative news.

ahem! ok promo for malaysiakini over… on to business. 🙂

It is hard to imagine that a group of people living just about 400km away from the capital city do not know who their prime minister is.

Even harder to digest is the fact that these same group of people are also not aware as to the significance of this year’s Merdeka celebrations.

actually i disagree with the writer here. it is not hard to imagine at all that they don’t know who’s the prime minister and about the merdeka celebration. why, they are living in isolation and being marginalised, of course they won’t know.

“We have asked for some basic amenities like proper housing, electricity and clean water but so far we have not received anything,” said Dubog.

He added that now the villagers have stopped making any requests to the Orang Asli Department, preferring to continue with their lives as it is.

this i’m not surprise at all. same thing happened to the temiar too.

He however agreed that it looked very unlikely that his village would have the same sort of development enjoyed by some of the other Orang Asli in the southern part of the Temenggor lake.

Ronnie and his villagers live in the northern part of the lake. Unlike their southern counterparts, these villagers are not Muslims. Being animists, they hold their forefathers as their gods.

yep. that was what i heard from the temiar too. only the muslim orang asli kampung enjoy development. what was that i heard pak lah saying… that he is fair all round?

Village head Dubog said that there had been attempts to convert them into Islam, and by some other groups into Christianity, but they had rejected them all.

yes, both groups may be persistent in evangelising to them but there is a big difference. the difference is that if they joined islam, the orang asli dept. will be more ‘friendly’ to them and they will enjoy developments but if they join christianity, nothing. nothing from the government. er… perhaps there is something – oppression!

“Our guiding gods are our forefathers. We won’t do anything to provoke their anger,” said village elder Masa, 40.

In fact, he said, one reason why the villagers spurned Islam was because their forefathers would be angry if they did not eat pork, considered illegal in Islam.

i guess this means for the other orang asli tribes, like those living in the southern part of the temenggor lake, they don’t believe in their forefathers as ‘gods’.

The biggest victims of the Jahai marginalisation from development are the children of the tribe – some 250 of them do not go to school.

The nearest school is located in Pulau Banding and getting to school on time is an issue.

“We have asked for the government to build us a school here for all the Jahai children but so far nothing has moved,” said Masa, adding that he now took his non-school-going sons to gather rattan and roots in the jungle.

how sad. didn’t our government say education is very important? didn’t someone said one of the way to combat poverty is through education? and yet…

“The Orang Asli on the other side (south of the Temenggor lake) has a school in their village and we too would like to have one,” added Dubog.

ahh… see pak lah, why we can’t believe that you are fair?

“But we have not been getting anything from them (government). So for us we think it is better if we just stick to our own ways,” he added, puffing away his rokok daun cabang (a type of self-rolled cigarette) and leading us for a tour of his village in the rain.

of course they will not get anything since they want to stick to their forefathers as their gods and not to allah. yes, i agree. it’s better for them to stick to their own ways. forget the government. forget development. as a commenter in jeff ooi’s blog had said, it’s better to leave them alone

It was hard to fathom that after 50 years of independence there were still Malaysians who live like the Jahai tribe, partly due to their own volition, but largely because the government ineptitude.

as i said, no, it’s not hard to fathom that at all. don’t be surprise there are many many others, not only orang asli but hardcore poor who live like that. second part on the government ineptitude, i whole heartedly agree!!

MALAYSIAKU GEMILANGKAH?