From Serian to Mongkos

I have been staying for almost a week in a small town Serian, about 50 km away from Kuching the capital city of Sarawak, providing advisory services to a few state-owned oil palm estates here. It was my last day today visiting an estate in Mongkos and the estate sent their driver to pick me up from the one and only hotel in Serian early in the morning.

The old guy who has been working for about 25 years as a tractor driver transporting fruit bunches from the estate to the mill was reassigned to be a driver taking guests and collecting mails a couple of years ago due to his old ailment. I have known this old guy since a few years ago and many a time while fetching me to and fro the estate, this talkative old man telling me lots of stories, more appropriately his life stories.

This time around the old guy was so annoyed with his daughter who was supposedly on a boarding school in Serian, decided to quit the school even that there is only a few more weeks before her SPM examination. The old man was both furious and sad, as a laborer his whole life, earning a meager of salary to support his family, he has high hope on his children to study hard and excel in academic so that they could live a better lives than him, but alas none of his children completes the secondary school so the old man who are going to retire in a couple of months time naturally feels very disappointed.

As we drove closer to Mongkos, he saw kampong folks walking on the road going to work in their small padi field nearby, the old man pointed at them and said that probably his children were destined to be the laborers like them, earning their living in a hard way. Then he started to criticize the Prime Miniter Najib for not giving bonus to the civil servant but just a token of RM 500. I listened to this old guy patiently although he was actually telling me the same story again and again with some updates of latest hiccups whenever he fetches me from Serian to Mongkos.

It is just like when I’m travelling from remote area in Serian to the metropolitan Kuching, you see the changes in almost every aspects of life, from broken long-houses, scattered padi fields and black pepper farms, bad stretches of roads filled with potholes to high rise buildings, high-tech factories and sophisticated expressways, the complexity of life is also as such I guess. When the Prime Minister is proposing another 100-storey building to be built in KL, perhaps more attention should also be given to uplift the livelihoods of millions of people who are still struggling in poverty.