Enter Miss Miri

Recollections of a working class Australian adjusting to ex-pat life in Miri.

I saw that the 60th annual Miss Universe 2011 beauty pageant will take place on September 12 and will air live from Sao Paulo, Brazil and, immediately I was transported back to Borneo when I sponsored my amah, Jelimah in her attempt to win the title.

Borneo, the third largest island in the world, is a land of steamy, rain-sodden jungles and home to the Dayaks, fierce tribes who worshiped pagan gods and spirits and whose name is synonymous with headhunting. But Jelimah, a thoroughly modern Dayak Miss, had turned her back on the centuries old tribal way of life for the bright lights of Miri.

Miri, a boom town, where a pretty girl could live in a house like a palace, and wear a different dress every day, not made with cloth she'd woven herself but purchased from glitzy shops crammed with jewels, creams and perfumes, shops with every delight imaginable to make her beautiful for the parties where she'd laugh and dance all night.

Jelimah was in a shop when my partner first met her - but serving, not buying. An assistant in a dry cleaners, she had swapped the steamy jungle for an even steamier environment and communal life in the longhouse for a cramped dormitory above the shop, shared with a dozen other starry-eyed wannabes.

There was no plumbing or power laid on in the jungle village in the back blocks of Sarawak, where every drop of water for drinking and cooking was drawn from the river. From as long as she could remember, it had been Jelimah's responsibility to fill the family's water pots at the riverbank and tote them back to the longhouse on stilts where she lived, at the end of a steep and winding jungle track.

She didn't have to go as far for drinking water in her new home. Just as far as the toilet. The only available water for washing and drinking was scooped from the cistern - the water tank that flushes and fills the toilet.

Paranoid about coming down with dysentery or, ... worse, from the moment I'd arrived in Miri, I boiled our drinking water for three minutes, always said an emphatic no to ice and only drank Coke from cans. I was appalled when my partner recounted how Jelimah was living. Even now, I shudder at the thought of dipping a cup into a slimy tank and I was easily persuaded to offer her a job as a live-in amah.

For both of us it must have been equally mind blowing. At the time, I felt I was doing something special by opening up my home to her. Heck it was a palace ... so different to what I was used to in Perth ... the deprived jungle girl had to think she'd died and gone to heaven.

I mean, it wasn't as if she had anything to do. Apart from some token dusting and sweeping, I continued to do 99% of the household chores. Some people have a way with servants. Not me! For the best part of a month, I pussy-footed round Jelimah treating her like a young relative I'd never met, over here on holiday who required entertaining.

I think Jelimah would have up and left her gilded cage sooner if she hadn't set her sights on entering a beauty pageant and needed a sponsor. I didn't hesitate and for the next six weeks everything took a backseat to winning Miss Miri.

More about Miri's answer to Miss Universe next time ...

Ann Massey

http://www.annmasseyauthor.net/

Author of:

The White Amah, a mystery set against the backdrop of the timber logging industry in Malaysia. Sample or purchase: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1456578065

The Biocide Conspiracy, a Young Adult thriller that sweeps readers into the world of biowarfare. Sample or purchase; http://www.amazon.com/dp/1456503367

Thou shall not wash dishes- - a green ex-pat struggles to come to terms with life in Borneo and the demands of her young amah

Two months into a relationship and my partner, a petroleum engineer, whisked me off to a life of luxury in Miri, on the island of Borneo.

For the wives of oil field workers like me, life is one round of shopping, bridge, golf and tennis. For the most part, children are at boarding schools back home - paid for by the company and husbands are on rigs in the South China Sea, so for women, life is one big social whirl! We didn't even have to clean up after ourselves. Why should we? We had our amahs. Like Curly Locks in the old nursery rhyme:

'Thou shalt no wash dishes nor yet feed the swine ...,
our amahs took care of all the household chores.

An amah is the Asian name for a servant. All my married friends, had amahs, most of them were older Malaysian women who worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for a pittance. Back then in the 90's the going rate was MR$250 a month. Converted to Aussie dollars, that's about 35c an hour.

Wives of men earning $10,000 a month plus free house, free car, free utilities, first class flights home for holidays and school fees paid for, at the best and most expensive schools, saw nothing wrong with this. As Mary-Grace from Calvary (not her real name), said to me,'They don't need much. I mean how much is a bag of rice."

The women who worked for ex-pats weren't complaining. They knew they had it good compared to the foreign girls who worked for the locals. The Chinese family who lived next-door to Mary Grace employed a Filipino. The first thing they did when she arrived was confiscate her passport so she couldn't runaway. Sleeping in a cupboard under the stairs - poky, stuffy,without a window and filled with the family's clutter, her duties went beyond housework and baby sitting - the male of the household took it as a given that she would sleep with him.

Not that the locals were the only ones to enjoy their amah's favours. Hundreds of single men and married men, (temporarily available), flocked to the oil town. I noticed their amahs were always the beauties, the delicate, ultra feminine Iban girls, straight from the jungle longhouses.

A lot of these men formed relationships with their amahs and, many of them married.and took their sweethearts back home. But, many others, just used them as pretty playthings and forgot about them when their contracts were finished.

I've written about a girl who was exploited by an ex-pat in my latest book The White Amah. You can read an excerpt and reviews on my website: http://annmasseyauthor.net/

For three years, I was the only ex-pat, in my circle of friends, who didn't have an amah until I employed Jelimah ... more about this Iban Cinderella in my next blog.

Ann Massey

http://www.annmasseyauthor.net/

Author of:

The White Amah, a mystery set against the backdrop of the timber logging industry in Malaysia. Sample or purchase: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1456578065

The Biocide Conspiracy, a Young Adult thriller that sweeps readers into the world of biowarfare. Sample or purchase; http://www.amazon.com/dp/1456503367

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Blogs this Year
• Thou shall not wash dishes - Saturday, January 15, 2011
• Enter Miss Miri - Thursday, January 13, 2011
• Click to Save the Rain Forest - Wednesday, January 12, 2011
• Borneo's Tropical Rainforest is Disappearing Fast ... So What! - Saturday, January 08, 2011
• Sweetest Things Turn Sourest By Their Deeds - Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Borneo's Tropical Rain Forest is disappearing fast: so what?

Trees are vital to human existence because they are the lungs of the earth. Man can survive for months without food but without oxygen life ceases within minutes.

When you destroy a blade of grass

You poison England at her roots

Remember no man's foot can pass

Where evermore no green grass shoots.

I first heard those lines from 'To Iron- Founders and Others' by Gordon Bottomley over fifty years ago when I was a pupil in Mr. Worthington's English Class at Hayward Grammar School.

Over the years I have read articles in newspapers and magazines, listened to lectures and viewed documentaries about the far reaching effects of deforestation but I cannot quote from a single one. Who says poetry isn't relevant in the twenty-first century? Bottomley's warning is indelibly stamped on my conscious and my conscious .

Today I recited this poem to my students and then went on to tell them about what is happening in Borneo. How proud, formerly self-sufficient Dayaks have been forced off their ancestral lands by rapacious loggers and forced to live beggarly lives because they lack the education and skills to adapt to a changed environment. This led to a heated discussion about Develoment vs Conservation: such is the power of poetry.

Ann Massey

http://www.annmasseyauthor.net/

Author of:

The White Amah, a mystery set against the backdrop of the timber logging industry in Malaysia. Sample or purchase: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1456578065

The Biocide Conspiracy, a Young Adult thriller that sweeps readers into the world of biowarfare. Sample or purchase; http://www.amazon.com/dp/1456503367