The Letter From Home

Peace Corps Volunteer Gets Letter From Home


I parked my motorcycle next to the steps of fellow Peace Corps Volunteer Mike’s bungalow entrance. He lived in government quarters of Sabah, Malaysia’s capital, a city with a population of only twenty-five thousand. I’d driven four and half hours from my remote jungle post to get there.

The first leg of my trek was over a hilly, bolder strewn, and rutted dirt road to my halfway stop, Kota Belud, a governmental and Chinese commercial shops outpost community of three thousand people. Wandering in and about it was a menagerie of horses, cows, mules, and water buffaloes.

Kota Belud was Bajau territory, an ethnic language group dispersed along the coastal areas of North Borneo and across the Sulu Sea to nearby Philippine Islands.

Bajaus were sea people with houses on pilings along coastal tidal zones. Some literally lived asea on boats. Historically they were “Muslim light” pirates. They’d converted to fishing and smuggling but in Kota Belud had moved inland and become “cowboys” who raised livestock and paddy rice.

They also provided horses and jockeys for Sabah’s horse races in its capital.

None of that meant much to me. What Kota Belud meant to me was, it’s where asphalt paving and electricity began. There, I stopped to the bright lights of a Chinese a shop, a “kedi”, for a cup of Milo, a chocolate drink, produced by Nestle’s for Asian consumption.

Pop, the shopkeeper, locally known as the six-foot Chinaman, had an extensive collection of English rock and roll records he’d accumulated to entertain recently departed British troops who’d secured the area from Philippine and Indonesian guerrilla insurgencies.

He was atypical Sabah Chinese, a tall Hainanese. I suspected he had an interesting story of Sabah origin, but didn’t know what it was, if he did.
I’d slept with him, unmolested, the first time I was in Kota Belud. It was in his large mosquito screened bed above the shop. It was because I was stranded in Kota Belud, which had no overnight commercial accommodation, when I missed the last Land Rover transit service leaving it. He had graciously allowed me to share his bed above his shop.

His European height stood out compared to the short Hakka Chinese, brought to Sabah as coolies by the British to tap rubber. and the Cantonese Chinese shop keepers, who had drifted into Sabah on their own as merchants.
Like often in Sabah, Kota Belud was a babble of languages with kampong Malay verbally tying the different Chinese, Rungus, Duzen and Bajau populations together.

English segregated the Chinese business and white government classes from the natives.

As I sipped my Milo, I noticed Pop was sporting a black cloth patch pinned to an upper shoulder shirt sleeve. That was a Chinese symbol which proclaimed a year’s mourning for death of a close family member. For him, it was for his mother who’d previously served me Milo.

Pop would put on a British rock and roll record when I stopped by to the irritation of his regular customers. In addition to his shop, he was also one of the officials who oversaw the weekly horse races in the capital.

If I was going to the capital before a horse race, he’d let me know which race was fixed and the winning horse.

With his mother’s passing, his daughter, also tall, now padded to-and-fro on sandals, serving the customers. In her late twenties, she was a left-over woman, unsuitable for marriage. Her stigma was having had an English army boyfriend, during the insurgencies. He’d left her behind when peace had returned and he was reassigned somewhere else in the shrinking British Empire. Her fate as a result was serving shop customers and caring for Pop in his old age.

As I departed, I bought four Tiger beers. The daughter tied them together with twine, neat and snug, better than a USA six pack. She handed me the twine bound four pack. Our eyes met. Her demure smile and grazed touch suggested a faint hope her five years seniority wasn’t an issue. She couldn’t know my personal financial situation made age difference the least issue. I was not going to compound her or Pop’s stigma.

After securing the beer to the handlebars, I swung on the motorcycle, kicked down the starter, and the bike jumped to attention. The second half of my trek was on a narrow, but asphalt smooth road that twisted and turned along the contours of Borneo hills, interspaced with rice paddy lowlands.

Without the jolts and bumps of a rutted road, I revved the engine with the right handlebar hand grip on straight stretches and foot brake slowed and banked through the curves. As I sped, the cool tropical night air blew through my hair, sans helmet. I loved my bike, a new 175 CC Suzuki. It let out a hum awakening whine as I passed kampongs.

The road’s danger during the day was curves. Rounding one, a Land Rover, attempting to pass another, would suddenly confront me. At night, darting around vehicle confrontations eased due to headlights piercing the jungle darkness with forewarning. The road’s night hazard was dogs sleeping on the pavement. I’d recovered the bike’s wobble after running over a few in the past.

This night no dogs interfered with my throttling and breaking to Kota Kinabalu, Saba’s little capital, recently named Jesselton under British Colonialism, and since World War Two, Api-Api by the Chines, roughly translated, “Fire Town” when Australian battle ships leveled it when occupied by the Japanese.

In the city’s lights and cross streets, I first went to my post office box, unknown by any but me. Mail service to my rural location was too tardy and intermittent for issues I had left behind in the USA. In the box was an only five-day old letter from home by my younger brother. I didn’t open it. I stuck it in my shirt pocket to read at Mike’s.

In the city, I also had a secret bungalow, a small, one-bedroom, duplex apartment near the airport. It had been “gifted” to me by a departing Peace Corps Volunteer, Ed. He taught at Gaya College, was Irish, loved to drink, but his $100 a month Peace Corps allowance made that difficult in the city.

I had excess allowance money due to my rural location with limited spending options. When coming to the city, I’d stop at Ed’s and announce,

“Ed, let’s kill a buffalo.”

to crash on his sofa. The red, $10 Ringgit, Malaysia currency had a water buffalo image. That was good for a couple tall ones at the bar he frequented. I’d kill a couple of buffaloes, and if flush, three for a night on the sofa.

When his tour ended, I went to the airport to see him off. There, among other volunteers he pulled me aside and said,

“Jim, here’s the key to my place. The Peace Corps bunked me with another guy when I arrived here. A friend at the college got me my own pad, unofficially. Neither the Peace Corps nor the Sabah government knows. I don’t know how it’s registered either. I’m passing it on to you. Pay the utilities and keep it secret.”

It became my ultra secret. I only let a couple of remote stationed Volunteers use it when they visited the capital to avoid abusing the hospitality of Volunteers stationed there and a Malaysian government member of Parliament, Joe.

Joe also owned the Last Chance Bar. He was an English army veteran and a champion bantam boxer when young. He’d built a professional sized boxing ring behind his bar to train young boxers. Sitting with a Peace Corps friend in his bar, he convinced us to do a round of boxing with two young boxers he was training.
Our enticement was free beer.

In the back of the bar there was a little stage fronting the boxing ring. It was filled with standing room only, beer drinking, native males. It was obvious we were white devils to be sacrificed. With screams of support for our opponents and boos for our swings, we managed to stay standing for our three-minute round. Despite pleas for another round of white devil bashing, we returned to the bar and licked our wounds.

Shortly after my three-minute boxing lesson, Joe unexpectedly showed up at my rural farm school for a kampong wedding. While Catholic married to a wife who helped run the bar plus a gaggle of offspring, he needed a pagan wedding due to an upcoming additional offspring in a hamper.

He also while visiting confided he needed a place for rendezvous with English Colonial wives. Considering his member of parliament status, I granted him nocturnal visiting privilege to ultra secret. With his friendship I acquired Malaysian member of Parliament influence insurance. While never needed, it was nice to have, considering I drove my motorcycle without a helmet, a Peace Corps reg violation.

He also informed me my former Peace Corps girlfriend, who’d justifiably dumped me after my bad action, had quit the Peace Corps and married Ed. I wasn’t upset and wished the best for both.

I don’t know what Joe’s ultra secret nocturnal visit frequency need was. It only once cause me a delayed nights stay.

Instead of checking things at ultra-secret, I went straight to Mikes. I wanted to catch up on Peace Corps gossip, didn’t want to drink, and worried about what was in the letter. I needed pleasant company. News from home was seldom good.

I unloaded the beer, sat on Mike’s porch step, and awaited Mike’s coming out as I freed the bottles from twine. In the warm tropical evening, I fetched the letter out of my shirt pocket and broke it open after a sip of beer. It was double-sided, a two pager, unusual for my brother to write more than a note.

I only read the first sentence.

“Jim, mom didn’t make it.”

Four short words, “mom didn’t make it”.
My mother was dead, dead at fifty-eight. I put the letter back into my shirt pocket.

A tear welled up. I tried not to cry but wept.

I didn’t finish my beer, told Mike I was leaving, and drove to my bungalow.
There, relieved Joe hadn’t needed it that night, I read the rest of the letter. It detailed how a young doctor, learning the technique of open-heart surgery, tried his best at the county hospital but, “mom didn’t make it”.

It was my family’s fate, so unfair. My mother, died in a county hospital, a learning guinea pig for a young, student doctor. My father was in an insane asylum. My younger brother was struggling in college on welfare.

As the weeping shifted to sobs, tears slowed, calm returned. Emotion gave way to logic. It was for the best. She’d been on the cusp of death for years. She’d given it her best try, stopped drinking, stopped smoking, tried to eat well, but “mom didn’t make it”, end of story.

My life suddenly simplified. I didn’t’ need to daily write letters home to uplift morale. My younger brother could dedicate his time fully to university study, the third of my $75 a month Peace Corps, USA readjustment allowance, I’d allocated to family, was now all his.

Dad was secure in Agnew, a California State mental hospital, where I had committed him before entering the Peace Corps, (eventually diagnosed due to occupational lead poising). Now, all I had to worry about was me. The dark cloud of home lifted.

I didn’t need to worry about food like when working my way through university. I no longer feared the rent due date. I had a free apartment in the capital. I had a new motorcycle. I had friends, even a member of parliament. Life in the Peace Corps was great.

I went back to Mike’s to celebrate.

He attempted to consol me. I told him I didn’t need sympathy, life was great. We drank the beer I’d brought. Finished, I told him we had to kill a couple of buffaloes at the Last Chance Bar.
Joe wouldn’t let me pay.
My Peace Corps Volunteer experience was great, a highlight in my eighty-two year life.