Selamat

First published in The Great Outdoors, 2019

We first met Keith and Lucy at a café in Kuching. Karen and I were in Kuching for a few days while our visa renewals were being processed and I was trying to get some business done while I was in town. We were at the café for the coffee and the free wifi.  I was trying to send some emails but my lap top was on the blink and I was getting increasingly frustrated. I was usually very patient with people, but when technology that I relied on wouldn’t work for me, my impatience tended to escalate to anger and cursing.

“Shit! Fuck! Bugger! It keeps crashing,” I muttered. “There’s something seriously wrong with it.” Karen had a go with it but she was even less tech savvy than me.

That’s when Keith spoke up. “Would you like me to take a look at it?”

“Are you a technician?” I asked, hopefully.

“I work in IT.”

“He’s a computer engineer,” said Lucy.

“She’s a computer whizz herself,” said Keith, “but I’ll have a go at it if you like.”

“Ok, sure, go ahead.”

He tried to run some diagnostics but he was just getting the same results. It wouldn’t even boot up. Then he got a USB drive out of the day pack he was carrying and plugged it into my lap top. I couldn’t follow exactly what he was doing but he ran a series of tests and made a series of noises that hopefully meant he was getting to the root of the problem. Then a sudden expletive “Jesus Christ, that was a nasty one!”

I said I appreciated the help but would he mind not swearing.

“But you were just swearing a blue streak yourself,” he said.

I said, “I don’t mind a bit of coarse language and obscenities but I mean using the name of Jesus as a swear word. It’s taking the Lord’s name in vain. I would never do that and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.”

 He said okay, with a bemused expression, and probably made a mental note that I was a religious nut, and he said he needed to run a few more checks.

 “Yeah, sure, carry on. I really do appreciate this. Can I get you a coffee?”

“I’ll have a flat white, thanks.”

“And I’ll have a cappuccino,” said Lucy.

“Kopi luak?” I suggested.

“What’s that?”

“Local specialty coffee.”

“Sure. We’re into sampling local fare.”

So we did introductions and chatted over coffee while Keith continued his investigations.

“Nice coffee,” Lucy remarked. “Very smooth.”

“It’s the best, reputedly,” I said.

“Grown locally you say.”

“Grown and gathered locally, from the excrement of the civet that eats the ripe coffee berries.”

Lucy spat a mouthful of cappuccino back into her cup.

“Oh, it’s that jungle cat that shits coffee beans.” Keith had heard of it. He laughed and savoured his flat white with great interest.

I assured Lucy it was safe and hygienic but she would have no more of it.

“You said you liked it,” Keith teased. He finished his cup and shut down my computer. He said I had a nasty virus and my Operating System was damaged.

“So, how can I get rid of the virus?” I asked.

“I just removed it,” he said.

“Great. And my data?”

“That’s all safe for now. But you need to install a new Operating System. I could do that for you if you like but I’d have to back up all your data and it would take a bit of time.” Keith had a proposition: “You say you have to stay in Kuching for a few days. You’ve got wheels, you know your way around and you know the language. Take us back to our hotel and I’ll set up what needs to be done for your computer and you tour guide us on a couple of outings.”

Karen and I looked at each other, I decided to trust Keith with my lap top and I said, “Okay, where do you want to go?”

Keith worked for Microsoft in Los Angeles and he and Lucy were in Malaysia on holiday. They had flown to Kuala Lumpur for the Malaysian Grand Prix and they’d come to Sarawak because Lucy wanted to see orang-utans in their native habitat. “Such gorgeous animals!” Lucy affirmed.

As it happened Karen and I had planned to visit the Semonggoh Orang-utan Rehabilitation Centre so we offered to take them there and I showed them the brochure I had with me. Keith read the cover page: “Orang-utan Rehabilitation Centre… Graduates transferred into forest reserve”, and he chuckled. ”I know a few apes in rehab in LA who never graduated.”

When we picked up Keith and Lucy from their hotel in the morning, they had just returned from having breakfast in a nearby open air restaurant. “They have noodles for breakfast,” Lucy said incredulously.  “Who has noodles for breakfast? It’s not lunch. It’s breakfast.” I watched her mouth speaking and laughing, her glossy red lips parting to reveal perfect, dazzling white teeth. Are they natural? I wondered. Do all Americans get their teeth fixed and whitened?  

 “It’s just a cultural difference”, I said. In her mind, obviously, her own familiar culture was perfectly normal and other cultures were abnormal. I considered how I could talk about the prejudice of ethnocentricity, without appearing to be judging her. I considered asking her what she normally had for breakfast and saying how strange this might seem to a Malaysian or indeed, any of the billions of Asians in the world, but I got a little distracted. She was wearing a low cut sleeveless dress that may have been appropriate for the climate, but not for a place with such a large Moslem population. She was attracting stares: some admiring and some disapproving. My own eyes were drawn to her cleavage and I couldn’t help wondering if her breasts were real. And the conversation moved on to visiting the orang-utans.

The orang-utan reserve was a big hit. I was content to watch these intriguingly human- like creatures from an unobtrusive distance but Lucy and Keith wanted to get up close and personal, which they were able to do by paying an extra fee. They entered an enclosure with a warden and Lucy picked up a baby orang-utan, while Keith snapped photos of her cuddling ‘the adorable creature.’ The mother orang-utan was not so keen on this arrangement, however, and in a maternal panic, rushed at Lucy. The warden was on hand to intervene and he received some nasty scratches for his trouble.

At the end of the day we had dinner together back in Kuching. Lucy said they were surprised to find a decent sized modern city on Borneo, not just jungle and villages. “I love this place,” she said. “Who knew? Who knew there was such a place as Kuching, a cat city with a huge statue of cats in the centre of town?”

 “Most of the island is still covered in rain forest but there are a few cities,” I said, “and a very rich little country in the north of the island.” How is it, I wondered, that even well educated Americans have so little knowledge of world geography?

Lucy loved cats and really wanted to go to the Cat Museum the next day. I was less keen on this outing as I thought from the brochures I’d seen that it would be a bit kitsch. We entered the museum through the gaping mouth of a huge model of a cat head into a world of cats and all things feline, real and fictional, including the cartoon characters Felix and Garfield. But the exhibits of native Malaysian cats were interesting. The clouded leopard, I thought was one of the most beautiful creatures in all creation. Lucy was enthralled.

“That turned out better than the last museum we went to,” Keith remarked. “When we were in Japan we went to the war memorial museum in Hiroshima. It’s pretty graphic and Lucy, being so sensitive and emotional, just felt overwhelmed with horror and guilt, you know, for what America did to them. We never made it all the way through. She just sat down and cried and we had to leave.”

“How did you feel about it?” I asked.

“It was pretty sad all right,” he said, “but hey, that’s war and it probably shortened the war and saved more lives in the long run.”

We got to know each other a bit, of course, over the two days of hanging out together. Keith and Lucy thought we might be Australian and they had a vague idea of where New Zealand was. Everyone’s seen “the great New Zealand story”, Lord of the Rings. “And what’s a couple of kiwis doing in Borneo?” they wanted to know. So I told them about the Selamat Training Centre in West Kalimantan, where I worked as a builder and Karen worked as a teacher. Selamat was set up by the international Christian missionary organisation, World Outreach, to provide education for children from the town of Balai Karangan and outlying villages, some as remote as an eight-hour river journey by dugout canoe. It includes a boarding school and orphanage, we explained, and an outreach to the Dayak people. And yes, we agreed, that made us kind of missionaries. All the workers there are missionaries, including the Indonesian nationals. They’re all graduates of the World Outreach Tawangmangu Bible College in central Java and they’re serving in the poorest parts of their country. Keith and Lucy showed great interest and approval.

 Keith was a high flying executive with Microsoft and he and Lucy lived a very affluent California lifestyle. And they, Keith especially, enjoyed a bit of adventure, which they could easily afford to pursue. Lucy worked as a designer in the fashion industry and she enjoyed a successful and privileged lifestyle.

I didn’t usually talk about myself so much but Keith had a lot of questions. He seemed intrigued and puzzled about my chosen lifestyle and my work at the Selamat Centre. I explained that I had come on board with the founders of the Training Centre and because of my expertise in the construction industry I was in charge of the building projects. There were plans for a high school at the Centre and we were about to start building another dormitory block for the students.

“I’ll bet it doesn’t pay as well as working in New Zealand,” said Keith.

“It’s all voluntary work,” I said. “We don’t get paid. In fact we have to pay for our accommodation.”

He looked dumbfounded and asked how we supported ourselves.

I explained that I had sold my business in New Zealand and invested in a couple of properties that paid me rent, and our home church in New Zealand also contributes a bit to supporting us. And anyway the cost of living at Selamat, including the accommodation, was very cheap.

Keith said he admired our commitment and our humanitarian work for the poor natives of Borneo. He said also that he wanted to explore more of Borneo off the tourist trails and wondered if he and Lucy could come with us and stay for a bit if they gave a donation to the Centre. I knew that the staff bungalow next to ours was vacant at the time and I said I thought this would be a good arrangement but he couldn’t expect five star accommodation. They wouldn’t have air conditioning and they would have to make do with a ceiling fan in the tropical heat; in fact, we were located almost exactly on the equator.

Visitors came and went at the Centre fairly often, especially people from World Outreach, including recently the CEO’s son who was leading a group of youth workers on a short-term missions tour. Then at about the same time there was a journalist and her cameraman husband making a documentary film, a young woman I see doing the TV news when I’m back in New Zealand.

We finally picked up our freshly minted visas and drove them to the border crossing between Malaysia and Indonesia with Keith and Lucy. The poverty of West Kalimantan was immediately obvious as we exited the check point onto gravely deteriorating roads and in every ramshackle village we drove through. We stopped briefly near Balai Karangan where a small gang of workers, stripped to their shorts, were working on the road. They were melting a 44 gallon drum of tar over an open fire and mixing road fill with long handle shovels to patch up the tar seal.

Keith and Lucy received a warm welcome from Isaac and Yuliana, the Indonesian couple who were in charge of the mission school. And also from Simon, another kiwi, the pastor for the centre. Our guests got straight into the routine of the community by turning up at six o’clock in the morning for devotions with the staff, followed by communal breakfast, usually with noodles, and always there was fresh pineapple and other tropical fruit grown at the centre. Everyone greeted each other in the morning with selamat pagi and sat on the floor of the common room and joined in the hymns and prayers.  Keith said he found it a peaceful and uplifting start to the day and, after a few days of what he referred to as their retreat, he said that he had never before been part of such a peaceful, harmonious, loving and caring community.

 “It’s the joy of the Lord, in a community of faith,” said Karen. “That’s what makes it such a special place.”

“Yeah, it is pretty good here,” I agreed, “but it’s not Utopia. There’s no Utopia in this life. Where ever you get people living together you get disagreements and problems. But we’re all working together for a common purpose here and it’s not about ourselves. That helps.”

Sunday church service was an eye opener for Keith and Lucy. It was not the gentle hymns of morning devotions. It was loud, exuberant, upbeat praise and worship music with a rock band set up with some quite accomplished musicians and Petrus leading the singing and exhorting the congregation with “Come on, let’s raise the roof!” as they launched into a rousing rendition of One Way Jesus.

“Wow, I’m so impressed with these people,” said Keith, speaking into my ear as you would at a rock concert. “Such a gentle spirit but they really know how to party. They rock!” After the service, Keith made similar comments about the Dayaks: “Lovely peaceful people and the girls are just beautiful.”

“Yeah, beautiful people,” I agreed. “Small stature, big heart. They haven’t always been so peaceful, you know. They used to be fierce head hunters.”

Lucy made no comments but she was visibly moved during the worship when the pace of the music slowed down, but was no less intense and the songs focused on glorifying God and invoking the Holy Spirit. At the end of praise and worship the atmosphere was peaceful and meditative. Then Simon delivered a sermon with several key quotes from the bible, beginning with Joshua in the Old Testament with the Israelites entering the Promised Land, and touching on themes of journey, choice, commitment and transformation.

“Now therefore, fear the Lord, serve Him in sincerity and in truth, and put away the gods which your fathers served on the other side of the river and in Egypt… choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve… But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

Simon then went to the New Testament, in Galatians, with the apostle Paul speaking of the Kingdom of God and the fruit of the Spirit.

 “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.”

“There it is,” I said quietly to Keith. “That’s the character of this place. It’s the fruit of the Spirit. The Kingdom of God isn’t really a place. It’s the rule of God in the lives of the people devoted to God.”

Simon then went to the book of John to focus on the words of Jesus: “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

He then invited anyone who had not surrendered their life and asked Jesus into their heart to repeat with him a prayer by which they would do exactly that. It was an invitation to all but directed particularly at the boarding students who attended the church service. That done, he finished with the benediction from Second Corinthians: “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

*

Monday morning Keith joined me and our gang of young builders with some construction work but he was finding working outdoors in the tropical heat hard to cope with. He was interested in everything that was going on at the Centre and he was enjoying his stay but I wasn’t sure how Lucy was finding it. She had become quieter and didn’t comment much on anything. She got on well with Yuliana, who fortunately had reasonably good English. Lucy asked if there was anything she could do to help out, to contribute to the place.  Yuliana suggested that if Lucy knew her way around a sewing machine and overlocker she could help Vera with sewing aprons for the kindergarten kids to use in art class. They didn’t want them to get paint on their school uniforms. Lucy drafted the patterns and they set up shop in the sewing room, again a room with no air conditioning, so it was like a sweat shop. When I looked in on them they had aprons cut out and spread across the floor and they were running them up on the machines one after another.

After seven days’ work of the fifteen days Lucy spent at Selamat, she and Vera had produced sixty beautifully made aprons of three different sizes. She also spent some time in Karen’s classes helping with English lessons and getting to know the children. At the end of her apron sewing labours Lucy said, “I don’t know how to explain this but I found making those aprons in the sweat shop more satisfying than making a one of a kind $10,000 designer gown in a studio.”

There were days away from the training centre when Simon took us out in the SUV and hit the rough roads of the countryside for a bit of sightseeing or more often to visit some remote little church or school. One day we paid a visit to Pastor Johannes, another Tawangmungu graduate. Johannes had church meetings with a few parishioners in his home and he was building a church, literally from the ground up. Next to his house there were piles of sand and bags of cement and wooden forms for making blocks. In the same area we had a look at a school house that was in such bad repair it was open to the elements and there were gaping holes in the floor that a child could have disappeared into it.

Simon was responsible for church planting and overseeing the pastors of several small churches in the area. He also served as trouble shooter and visiting preacher from time to time in these ‘daughter churches’. On our second Sunday we accompanied him to one of these outlying churches in a community where there was some strife and division. Their Pastor Arif led us with his guitar in praise and worship and Simon preached a sermon in English and Pastor Arif translated it into Bahasa. It was a message of encouragement to be steadfast in your faith in the face of persecution and times of trouble and testing. Persecution and division are to be expected, he said, and he quoted the words of Jesus from the book of Matthew on the cost of following Jesus.

 “Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be those of his own household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me.  And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me.  He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.”

“That was a hard lesson,” Keith commented on our way home, “about putting Jesus before your own family.”

“Yes it was,” Simon agreed, “but we don’t compromise the Gospel.”

“Do you think the message about differences of belief dividing a family also applies to husbands and wives?” Keith asked.

“Yes I do.”

“You must be very sure of your belief,” said Keith. “There could be lives at stake.”

“There are lives at stake, for all of eternity. That’s why it’s so important.”

“How can you be sure that it’s all really true?” Keith persisted.

“I apprehend it by faith and my spirit witnesses to the truth of it,” said Simon resolutely.

Most of the work at the Centre ceased on Sunday and resumed on Monday, including the production of aprons. Karen and I brought cold drinks to the sewing workshop at morning tea time for Lucy and Vera and we sat together on the shaded veranda.

“So, how are the aprons coming along?” I asked.

“Good. Nearly finished,” said Lucy, and after a short pause, “Jason and Karen, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you, and Simon too, but he’s gone off to Tawangmangu. You know when we were coming back from Arif’s church yesterday and Keith was questioning Simon about his faith, Simon said his spirit witnesses to the truth of the Gospel. I know exactly what he meant. I didn’t even know I had a spirit before I came here, but at our church service here when Simon invited us to repeat the prayer of repentance and salvation, I said that prayer from my heart. And when he gave the benediction I really felt the love of God and the grace of Jesus. It wasn’t just vague, warm fuzzies. It was a revelation. It was overwhelming. I know it was my spirit responding to the spirit of God. I’m a different person from who I was when I arrived here. I guess that’s what he meant by being born again. I’m tearing up just thinking about it again. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cry.”

“Well, praise God! And welcome to the kingdom,” said Karen and gave her a hug and so did Vera and I.

I asked her if she’d told Keith.

“No, not yet,” she said. He’s still hanging on to his scepticism and his psychological explanations. I’m hoping he’ll catch what I got here.”

“Well don’t give up hope,” I said. “He’ll see the change in you and I believe the prayers of my wife had a lot to do with me coming to faith.”

*

Keith made a generous donation to the Centre and said that he would also supply twenty computers for the school. He felt he could also contribute with professional advice as a business analyst so we set up a meeting with the Centre leadership team.  Keith had prepared a SWOT analysis of the whole enterprise and started by commending the team on the success of their core business of providing education for the children of the area, which attracted government funding. The school had established a reputation as the best education provider in the district, Keith continued, and he had noted that Moslem children were attending the kindergarten. He had seen their mothers dropping them off. This was a credit to the school but also a potential threat, in his opinion, as hard line Islamists might object to Moslem children receiving a Christian education and make trouble.

Isaac had very limited English and Simon and I acted as interpreters. Isaac replied that their core business was advancing the kingdom of God and caring for orphaned and abandoned children and giving them a hope and a future. He was not concerned about hard line Islamists, and teaching Moslem children was not a threat, but an opportunity for teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to those who did not know it. And he added that Keith did not understand the spiritual dynamic of the Centre but Lucy did.

We just nodded and let Keith continue without translating Isaac’s comments. He recommended that the Centre continue with their efforts toward self sufficiency. The bakery was a model of success as it supplied food for staff and students, sold product in the town and provided employment at the Centre. The fish farm was another worthwhile project but needed more aquacultural expertise and the Centre needed to provide washing machines to stop local women from washing clothes in the fish pond. He also recommended the Centre invest in solar power so they would not have to rely on the unreliable diesel generator in the town. They should harness the power of the sun, a resource they had in abundance.

Isaac responded to most of these practical issues by saying, “Yes he’s right. We already know this. It’s just a matter of money for development and we have plans for many more developments. We will never become self sufficient because we will always rely on God. The Lord provides. He has never failed us and He is sufficient.”

Lucy’s only comment was that she would like to return and join the staff as a teaching assistant for Computing or English or Sewing or in whatever capacity she could be of service. Isaac thanked Keith and Lucy for their contributions and said they were welcome to return any time.

Karen and I heard Keith and Lucy arguing on their last night at the Centre. We couldn’t hear what they were saying but we could definitely hear their voices raised in anger coming through the thin walls of the bungalows. This was surprising because they seemed like a close couple and looked quite relaxed all the time they were at the Centre. All seemed to be well in the morning though. They said their farewells at breakfast and Karen and I drove them to Kuching and saw them off at the airport, after which we picked up supplies in the city as always and returned to Selamat.

*

And now, two months on, here I am back in Kuching again waiting at the airport to pick up Lucy. Yep, just Lucy this time. Keith was too busy with work commitments. He said he would come again another time and Lucy could oversee the shipment of computers. Lucy didn’t say how long she planned to stay but she was keen to get started on her work at the Centre. That’ll be her plane landing now.