The Mamak Chronicles: The Outdoors

Another early tangle with Subang-KL traffic brought us to the MERCY Malaysia warehouse around 9 o’clock in the morning. Our mission for the day was to mantle and dismantle inflatable Rofi tents that would be used as temporary clinics in disaster areas. We had to do this so that our coworkers could write instruction manuals that MERCY Malaysia volunteers would use when they went to these disaster areas. This exercise also conveniently doubled as an internship excuse to drag reluctant manpower out on a Saturday morning, as one of our co-workers so cheerfully described it. We figured that it couldn’t be an internship if we weren’t asked to do some unwanted grunt work once in awhile, so out to the warehouse we went.

At the warehouse parking lot a group of volunteers were already there; some new like us, and some that have been on missions before. The mission vets took the lead, giving out instructions and appointing a team leader. The heavy bulky package needed to be unwrapped, rolled out and stretched out to lay the floor of the tent. This required all eight of us (four to a side) to be on our knees rolling the heavy tent flaps open. Then two people would attach a pump to one of the valves found on the side of the tent and begin to inflate. The inflation has to start at one end of the large tent to the other, and as one end goes up another two people have to march inside the semi-inflated dimness with support beams and place them horizontally between inflating arches to later serve mission doctors as a place to hang IV tubes and electrical wires and such. When the tent is fully erected, everybody has to get out and, grasping the handles found along the tent edges, lift and pull for their lives to ensure that the tent stands straight and steady (and isn’t likely to cave in on a bunch of civil-war patients because of one unchecked rumple under a supporting arch).

In the time it took to set up the tent, ominous dark clouds were rolling in over the warehouse and the sharp smell of dirt accompanied the prickly feeling of approaching rain. “It’s going to rain,” said a coworker unhelpfully as she watched the eight of us from the curb she sat on. “Yeah, we know, what else are we going to do? Leave the tent half-open?” replied a co-volunteer. We could feel the low atmospheric pressure on our backs, and working against the clouds and the clock we managed to stretch out the tent for the final time before those dark clouds broke and a sheet of water thundered down on us. We ran into the tent amid the team organizer’s cries of “real action ma!” and once inside, we watched the rain from the tent door.

“Real action ma!” is one way to describe it. Until then, we’d been holed up in the office writing about situations we’d never seen in places we’d never been. Even though we’ve studied about what happens in a war or a tsunami and the consequences that follow, this was the first time that we could actually visualize it. We could see the volunteers struggling to unroll tarp and put up polls in the middle of a disaster zone. We could see the patients crowding the beds with IV tubes plugged into them hanging from the beams of the tent. The work we’d been doing in the office wasn’t being faxed out into some black hole; it was going to real places with real people.

Sitting in the tent, listening to the rain thud on the tarp above our heads was the best part of our morning. The cool, dark atmosphere instilled a sense of calm in the rush of the day’s activities. Cut off from the world in those few moments, we all receded into ourselves. And that’s when it dawned on the two of us that this very tent that we were in would soon be a temporary sanctuary for the suffering and the dying. So many people will do their last rites here, while for others this tent will be a place of painful resurrection. We looked at the plastic floor covering , the blank canvas walls, the smooth arches: the tent had become a temple. We silently waited for the rain to stop, then walked back out into our lives, with not a wrecked home or a drop of blood in sight.

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The Mamak Chronicles documents the Malaysian summer of Nour Merza and Khalisah Stevens. With the convenient excuse of an internship, these two half Americans find their way into the heart of Kuala Lumpur, where, in between haggling over souvenirs and missing buses, they sustain themselves by frequenting the food stalls that line the streets of the city. It is in these Mamaks that they discover the lifeblood of all that is Malaysian.