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- Story Listed as: True Life For Adults
- Theme: Drama / Human Interest
- Subject: General Interest
- Published: 01/27/2025
Returning Again to Land Blow The Wind
Born 1944, M, from Santa Clara California, United States.jpeg)
I just “returned” from “returning” to Sabah, Malaysia. It wasn’t the first time, but it may be the last. I celebrated my eighty-first birthday there. My stage now, is old age.
I’d first arrived there in May 1967 as a Peace Corps Volunteer, “Farm School Teacher” who rode a motorcycle, fifty-eight years ago, when twenty-three years young.
Thanks for reading Jim’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
As those elderly are wont to do, I wondered what influence I had when sent out as a American “agent of change” as President Kennedy inferred we were.
I was officially a “Farm Schoolteacher” an American agriculture evangelist, sent to teach the third world how to farm, the USA way. Twelve of us were sent to Sabah, part of a new country called Malaysia, cobbled together by the British as they departed from their empire.
Of the twelve sent, eight were former city dwellers with a liberal arts college degree. Previously the closest they’d been to a farm was at a road side’s fruit stand but for a couple from New York City the closest was a vegetable urban street stall.
There were also female Volunteers, nurses or medical technicians, with medical training for their designated assignments without on job experience. With a couple of exceptions, all were twenty-one to twenty-three years old making me at twenty-three a senior of sorts.
We’d spent the previous three months in Hawaii learning to speak Malay and Sabah native customs. The farm schoolteachers also got a smattering of how to grow vegetables, saw the only rubber tree in Hawaii, and toured a sugar mill.
I was fortunate to be among the four with some agriculture background.
Sabah was one of two former British colonies on the island of Borneo, tossed in with Malaya, one-thousand and five-hundred miles to the west, to make the new country Malaysia.
Except for Brunei, a tiny, oil rich, British protectorate, the rest of the island of Borneo, about two thirds, is known as Kalimantan and is part of Indonesia. Borneo, the third largest island after Greenland and New Guinea has two-hundred and eighty-eight thousand square miles and is about six times the size of England.
Unlike most of Asia, in 1967, Borneo was sparsely populated at ten million souls or thirty-five persons per square mile versus England’s one-thousand and one-hundred per square mile. Historical headhunting, required of males before marriage, keep the population low along with topical diseases bfore their cures.
The current population without these restraints is twenty-five million, a two-point-five-fold increase. Indonesia is in the process of moving its capital to its side of the island which will jolt the population of the Island further upward.
The state of Sabah was the most resource rich area of the Island in oil, gold, copper, timber, and scenic tourist potential with its famous Kinabalu mountain. Its population in 1967 was only six-hundred-thousand or twenty-one people per square mile for its twenty-eight-thousand five-hundred square mile land area. Its current population is three-million-seven-hundred and fifty-thousand, a six-fold increase to just over one-hundred-people per square mile.
Sabah’s capital, Kota Kinabalu had a population of twenty-five -thousand in 1967 versus its current population of six-hundred and fifty-thousand, a twenty-five-fold increase.
Populations, therefore, of Borneo, Sabah, and Kota Kinabalu, in the fifty-eight-years since I first arrived, drastically increased but the changes are much deeper than suggested by population increases alone.
In May 1967, when I first arrived, the pilot banked the British Comet jet airplane before landing to provide the passengers a view of Sabah’s capital. It looked like a comfortable little city of twenty-five thousand. It was.
The airport’s tarmac ran adjacent to miles of coconut tree adorned sandy beach that faced the South China Sea. Adjacent to the landing strip was a residential subdivision with rows of leisurely spaced detached residential houses with well attended lawns, gardens, and flowers evident. It was comfortable British quaint in appearance.
When the plane’s wheels touched the runway, the pilot sharply reversed its engines to avoid the end of the tarmac. On ground observation the residential bungalows, all neat and clean, suggested a pleasant place to dwell. It was.
After a round of government meetings, we were assigned jobs The females went to Queen Elizabeth Hospital The farm schoolteachers were assigned to rural agriculture stations. The Sabah governmental bureaucracies were in flux with British staff shifting to native as Sabah transitioned from colonial status to Malaysian independence. Our American Peace Corps appearance was received by the lingering English as the final insult to their years of colonial service and the end of the British Empire on which the sun never set. We were.
At my rural agriculture station, I taught villagers to grow vegetables but that was to create a job for myself. The old kampong village women knew better than I how to grow veggies and sell them at weekly kampong market.
There were another agricultural agendas. The Malaysian Agriculture Department introduced new crops to get villageers to grow beyond their subsistence farming needs. Farmers were taught to grow IR-8, a new, high yielding rice strain developed by the Rockefeller Foundation which produced a huge yield, grew to maturity quickly and allowed annual double cropping, a farmer get rich program. Part of my job was to convince them to give up their tasty local village variety for the tastless new mono culture variety.
They also introduced peanuts for the pesants to grow. I was used to send out the sacks of raw peanuts and show the locals at my farm school how to plant and harvest these ground nuts which are a legum, not a nut.
Fifty-eight-years ago Sabah was still the “Land Below The Wind” as described in Agnes Keith’s book. On my last return Sabah, had metamorphosed into the “Land In The Wind” including the latest new gigantic airport terminal.
Pax Americana for the last 50 years has been kind to Sabah, at least in development.
As elderly are wont to do, I wondered, during my “return” visit, what influence I had when sent out as a young, twenty-three-year-old American farm schoolteacher evangelist on the vast changes that subsequently happened.
In the weeks of my “return” visit, the British were nowhere to be seen but English is spoken more now than back when they were there. Vastly greater numbers of Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese tourists, plus a smattering of Australians on a cruise ship stopover have replaced the British of yore. A million or so of Malays heve relocated to Sabah from the Malayan Peninsula too. Then there are the added million or so illegal Fhillipinos and Indonesians who do all the hard work, like ilegal aliens in USA.
Back in 1967, no woman drove a car, most vehicles were Land Rovers, and many roads were muddy during the monsoons.
Now there are freeways and dirt roads are rare. All women drive and amongst the air-conditioned vehicles stuck in traffic jams are Tesla, Mercedes, and Lexus cars, even a Ford pickup or two. There are also shopping malls and high rise office and residential condo buildings.
The Peace Corps motto was, “We are agents of change.”
Did I and fellow volunteers contribute to the drastic changes? The answer is no. If we played a part, it was a fleeting flicker in the vast whirlpool of change
If I now mention to someone in Sabah, “I was here, a Peace Corps Volunteer, way back when no woman drove, the roads were unpaved, electricity ended at the city limits, the Rungus native women wore brass rings on arms, legs an neck, the jungle was endless.”, I’d be met with a blank stare.
If I try to talk Malay, they answer in English, offended I assumed they were backward. The era of Peace Corps Volunteers is a tucked away forgotten fold of local memory.
So, what did happen if we were not the agents of change? It’s the same as what happened in the USA. The big screen TV in the Sabah living rooms stays off. If you want on to watch TV, it takes someone who can still remember how to turn it on and work. No videos are cluttered about . They’ve all been tossed out.
Who were the agents of change? Who were those that tossed up everything about and moved the world into hyper flux change. They were the internet gurus, not the Peace Corps Volunteers.
In 1964 Paul Baran proposed a communication network with no central command point, one able to communicate with each other, a distributed network.
Baran’s idea appealed to Lawarence Roberts and Leonard Kleinrock, who began work on the creation of a distributed network. Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf developed protocols that govern how data moved through a network. Pul Mockapetris and Jon Postel created DNS as a phone book for the internet. Tim Berners-Lee developed principles for the internet such as HTML,HTTP an URLs.In 1974, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, proposed a method sending digital data packets that can be read by any computer, but only the final host machine can open the envelope and read the message inside.
In the early 1980s, cheaper technology and the appearance of desktop computers allowed the rapid development of local area networks. Domain Name System introduced in 1983 by Paul Mockapetris which paved the way for the World Wide Web.
Email was an unintended consequence of the network but it increased its popularity and scope. Ray Tomlinson developed electronic mail using the @ symbol. Email then became the place for gossip and making friends. From the 1970s home computers grew exponentially which meant millions learned to play games.
The launch of the Mosaic browser in 1993 opened the web to a new audience of non-academics. The number of websites grew from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996. The internet and the World Wide Web were then established.
After that came those who knew how to make money or lose it. Netscape came and went, many others leaped up then fell down like Yahoo resulting in Dot Com booms and busts. Growth, however, never faltered. The internet expanded at hyper speed in a race of the new kings of media.
Now it’s Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Twitter, Amazon, Snap-chat, YouTube, Netflix and a host of less internet money making enterprises with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai Evan Spiegel, Andrew Jassy etc. the real agents of change.
They changed not just Sabah, but the entire world into a level playing field of information, emails, and games.
So it is, by age three the children of Sabah are on the internet 24/7. Even at a retirement facility visit, it was evident the elderly live on the internet to their dying day.
In Sabah now, rice paddies are no longer farmed, the jungle has been replaced with oil palm plantations, petroleum products have replaced rubber trees and what was once is gone.
There are, however, a few farmers near where my old and abandoned agriculture station was that grow peanuts. My contribution as a agent of change is, peanuts.
Returning Again to Land Blow The Wind(James brown)
I just “returned” from “returning” to Sabah, Malaysia. It wasn’t the first time, but it may be the last. I celebrated my eighty-first birthday there. My stage now, is old age.
I’d first arrived there in May 1967 as a Peace Corps Volunteer, “Farm School Teacher” who rode a motorcycle, fifty-eight years ago, when twenty-three years young.
Thanks for reading Jim’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
As those elderly are wont to do, I wondered what influence I had when sent out as a American “agent of change” as President Kennedy inferred we were.
I was officially a “Farm Schoolteacher” an American agriculture evangelist, sent to teach the third world how to farm, the USA way. Twelve of us were sent to Sabah, part of a new country called Malaysia, cobbled together by the British as they departed from their empire.
Of the twelve sent, eight were former city dwellers with a liberal arts college degree. Previously the closest they’d been to a farm was at a road side’s fruit stand but for a couple from New York City the closest was a vegetable urban street stall.
There were also female Volunteers, nurses or medical technicians, with medical training for their designated assignments without on job experience. With a couple of exceptions, all were twenty-one to twenty-three years old making me at twenty-three a senior of sorts.
We’d spent the previous three months in Hawaii learning to speak Malay and Sabah native customs. The farm schoolteachers also got a smattering of how to grow vegetables, saw the only rubber tree in Hawaii, and toured a sugar mill.
I was fortunate to be among the four with some agriculture background.
Sabah was one of two former British colonies on the island of Borneo, tossed in with Malaya, one-thousand and five-hundred miles to the west, to make the new country Malaysia.
Except for Brunei, a tiny, oil rich, British protectorate, the rest of the island of Borneo, about two thirds, is known as Kalimantan and is part of Indonesia. Borneo, the third largest island after Greenland and New Guinea has two-hundred and eighty-eight thousand square miles and is about six times the size of England.
Unlike most of Asia, in 1967, Borneo was sparsely populated at ten million souls or thirty-five persons per square mile versus England’s one-thousand and one-hundred per square mile. Historical headhunting, required of males before marriage, keep the population low along with topical diseases bfore their cures.
The current population without these restraints is twenty-five million, a two-point-five-fold increase. Indonesia is in the process of moving its capital to its side of the island which will jolt the population of the Island further upward.
The state of Sabah was the most resource rich area of the Island in oil, gold, copper, timber, and scenic tourist potential with its famous Kinabalu mountain. Its population in 1967 was only six-hundred-thousand or twenty-one people per square mile for its twenty-eight-thousand five-hundred square mile land area. Its current population is three-million-seven-hundred and fifty-thousand, a six-fold increase to just over one-hundred-people per square mile.
Sabah’s capital, Kota Kinabalu had a population of twenty-five -thousand in 1967 versus its current population of six-hundred and fifty-thousand, a twenty-five-fold increase.
Populations, therefore, of Borneo, Sabah, and Kota Kinabalu, in the fifty-eight-years since I first arrived, drastically increased but the changes are much deeper than suggested by population increases alone.
In May 1967, when I first arrived, the pilot banked the British Comet jet airplane before landing to provide the passengers a view of Sabah’s capital. It looked like a comfortable little city of twenty-five thousand. It was.
The airport’s tarmac ran adjacent to miles of coconut tree adorned sandy beach that faced the South China Sea. Adjacent to the landing strip was a residential subdivision with rows of leisurely spaced detached residential houses with well attended lawns, gardens, and flowers evident. It was comfortable British quaint in appearance.
When the plane’s wheels touched the runway, the pilot sharply reversed its engines to avoid the end of the tarmac. On ground observation the residential bungalows, all neat and clean, suggested a pleasant place to dwell. It was.
After a round of government meetings, we were assigned jobs The females went to Queen Elizabeth Hospital The farm schoolteachers were assigned to rural agriculture stations. The Sabah governmental bureaucracies were in flux with British staff shifting to native as Sabah transitioned from colonial status to Malaysian independence. Our American Peace Corps appearance was received by the lingering English as the final insult to their years of colonial service and the end of the British Empire on which the sun never set. We were.
At my rural agriculture station, I taught villagers to grow vegetables but that was to create a job for myself. The old kampong village women knew better than I how to grow veggies and sell them at weekly kampong market.
There were another agricultural agendas. The Malaysian Agriculture Department introduced new crops to get villageers to grow beyond their subsistence farming needs. Farmers were taught to grow IR-8, a new, high yielding rice strain developed by the Rockefeller Foundation which produced a huge yield, grew to maturity quickly and allowed annual double cropping, a farmer get rich program. Part of my job was to convince them to give up their tasty local village variety for the tastless new mono culture variety.
They also introduced peanuts for the pesants to grow. I was used to send out the sacks of raw peanuts and show the locals at my farm school how to plant and harvest these ground nuts which are a legum, not a nut.
Fifty-eight-years ago Sabah was still the “Land Below The Wind” as described in Agnes Keith’s book. On my last return Sabah, had metamorphosed into the “Land In The Wind” including the latest new gigantic airport terminal.
Pax Americana for the last 50 years has been kind to Sabah, at least in development.
As elderly are wont to do, I wondered, during my “return” visit, what influence I had when sent out as a young, twenty-three-year-old American farm schoolteacher evangelist on the vast changes that subsequently happened.
In the weeks of my “return” visit, the British were nowhere to be seen but English is spoken more now than back when they were there. Vastly greater numbers of Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese tourists, plus a smattering of Australians on a cruise ship stopover have replaced the British of yore. A million or so of Malays heve relocated to Sabah from the Malayan Peninsula too. Then there are the added million or so illegal Fhillipinos and Indonesians who do all the hard work, like ilegal aliens in USA.
Back in 1967, no woman drove a car, most vehicles were Land Rovers, and many roads were muddy during the monsoons.
Now there are freeways and dirt roads are rare. All women drive and amongst the air-conditioned vehicles stuck in traffic jams are Tesla, Mercedes, and Lexus cars, even a Ford pickup or two. There are also shopping malls and high rise office and residential condo buildings.
The Peace Corps motto was, “We are agents of change.”
Did I and fellow volunteers contribute to the drastic changes? The answer is no. If we played a part, it was a fleeting flicker in the vast whirlpool of change
If I now mention to someone in Sabah, “I was here, a Peace Corps Volunteer, way back when no woman drove, the roads were unpaved, electricity ended at the city limits, the Rungus native women wore brass rings on arms, legs an neck, the jungle was endless.”, I’d be met with a blank stare.
If I try to talk Malay, they answer in English, offended I assumed they were backward. The era of Peace Corps Volunteers is a tucked away forgotten fold of local memory.
So, what did happen if we were not the agents of change? It’s the same as what happened in the USA. The big screen TV in the Sabah living rooms stays off. If you want on to watch TV, it takes someone who can still remember how to turn it on and work. No videos are cluttered about . They’ve all been tossed out.
Who were the agents of change? Who were those that tossed up everything about and moved the world into hyper flux change. They were the internet gurus, not the Peace Corps Volunteers.
In 1964 Paul Baran proposed a communication network with no central command point, one able to communicate with each other, a distributed network.
Baran’s idea appealed to Lawarence Roberts and Leonard Kleinrock, who began work on the creation of a distributed network. Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf developed protocols that govern how data moved through a network. Pul Mockapetris and Jon Postel created DNS as a phone book for the internet. Tim Berners-Lee developed principles for the internet such as HTML,HTTP an URLs.In 1974, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, proposed a method sending digital data packets that can be read by any computer, but only the final host machine can open the envelope and read the message inside.
In the early 1980s, cheaper technology and the appearance of desktop computers allowed the rapid development of local area networks. Domain Name System introduced in 1983 by Paul Mockapetris which paved the way for the World Wide Web.
Email was an unintended consequence of the network but it increased its popularity and scope. Ray Tomlinson developed electronic mail using the @ symbol. Email then became the place for gossip and making friends. From the 1970s home computers grew exponentially which meant millions learned to play games.
The launch of the Mosaic browser in 1993 opened the web to a new audience of non-academics. The number of websites grew from 130 in 1993 to over 100,000 at the start of 1996. The internet and the World Wide Web were then established.
After that came those who knew how to make money or lose it. Netscape came and went, many others leaped up then fell down like Yahoo resulting in Dot Com booms and busts. Growth, however, never faltered. The internet expanded at hyper speed in a race of the new kings of media.
Now it’s Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Twitter, Amazon, Snap-chat, YouTube, Netflix and a host of less internet money making enterprises with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai Evan Spiegel, Andrew Jassy etc. the real agents of change.
They changed not just Sabah, but the entire world into a level playing field of information, emails, and games.
So it is, by age three the children of Sabah are on the internet 24/7. Even at a retirement facility visit, it was evident the elderly live on the internet to their dying day.
In Sabah now, rice paddies are no longer farmed, the jungle has been replaced with oil palm plantations, petroleum products have replaced rubber trees and what was once is gone.
There are, however, a few farmers near where my old and abandoned agriculture station was that grow peanuts. My contribution as a agent of change is, peanuts.
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