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Article Excerpt
I'm neither a former D.O. nor a missionary, yet I too am an Old Hand and one day I too shall write a memoir of life in Sarawak. Or maybe I won't. However, I have a title, and a catchy title is nothing to waste, so here it is: A Lawn in Borneo.
Life in Borneo has been mostly about cutting grass. Apart from the laborers on the roads, I must mow more grass than anyone in Lundu. The grass in the garden (kebun) must be shorn every month year-round--no winter here--and every month I join the men of the Stunggang in the gotong-royong upkeep of the church grounds.
Our "yard" occupies an odd-cornered tongue of land rising from swamp and forest on three sides. It was surveyed and titled under Rajah Vyner, and the surveyor-one Gomes-shrewdly mapped out a two-acre plot that was not likely to flood in landas season. Scattered engkabang and rubber trees show that people have lived and gardened here off and on since the 1800s. Nusi (my wife) was deeded this land 25 years ago and she in her turn planted a few cocoa trees, durians, mangoes, and coconuts.
Nothing is truer than that to do most outdoor things in Borneo, even to get from A to B, one must chop away lots of bush. Plant-life riots here, you...
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