Goodbye Malaysia

Breakfasting on roti canai, kayaking on the lake in Shah Alam, squeezing into train compartments at rush hour, and saying “lah” at the end of every sentence.

These are just a few of the things that come to mind as we reflect on our two months of work and play in Malaysia. Driving to the airport to go back home to Dubai, Nour realized with a start that she had been living in this Southeast Asian country for one-sixth of a year. She was far beyond the status of tourist and had started settling into the comfortable and quirky role of expat – Malaysia was, surprisingly, becoming home. She’d made different groups of friends, fallen in love with the local cuisine, started picking up the language, and even established a family base through Khalisah. But as the cliché goes, all good things come to an end, and it was soon time to leave. It had been two months of unexpected self-discovery, for both Nour the newcomer and Khalisah the returning resident. And they had their time with MERCY Malaysia and the Malaysian social scene to thank for it.

When we started our internship with MERCY Malaysia, we didn’t know what to expect. What greeted us at the office in downtown KL was a group of the friendliest staff members you could find in a 6000 mile radius. We were enthusiastically shown the ropes by the HR department, and gently nudged in the right direction whenever we went astray with the work we were given. We found that MERCY Malaysia is at the crux of the Malaysian humanitarian field. Donations from big companies like Patronas and collaborations with the likes of award-winning film director Yasmin Ahmad not only kept this small but powerful NGO going, but also powered the medical relief missions to places like Palestine and Bandar Aceh. Talking to fellow passengers at train stations or bus stops, they only had positive things to say about what they consider their national NGO. Supported by the donations of thousands of individuals and companies as well as being run by big-hearted professionals, we saw that MERCY Malaysia is truly aid delivered with care.

Work wasn’t all we did in Malaysia, of course. We tried packing in as much fun as we could into the precious few hours we had off each week. We made new friends, connecting with a group of local activists in the Young Muslims Project, and attending the Knowledge and Arts Tour that they put together for the summer. We also met up with Khalisah’s older friends from Sunway University College, and attended local gigs and scenes as well as doing what Malaysians do best—hang out at Mamak stalls. For Khalisah, this time was well spent on catching up with local pop culture. Like most third-culture kids, she suffers from the guilt of knowing all the intimate details of American pop singers and their second husbands and illegitimate children, but draws a blank when it comes to naming any popular Malaysian song.

This neglect of her other cultural identity was something she intended to correct, and this summer’s SHOUT! Awards and the kids from Sunway managed to correct that. Malaysia, she discovered, has a vibrant music scene that isn’t garnering the attention it deserves. From soul jazz singers like Zee Avi to indie-rock bands like Estranged to R&B masters like Joe Flizzow, Khalisah found herself spoilt for choice amongst the range of talent that came from her motherland. Her wallet could barely keep up with the CD’s she purchased in her last weeks.

Blazing through a whirlwind of music, mamak dinners and train rides, our time in Malaysia ended much earlier than we would have liked it to. Just as we were getting comfortable in our roles as Malaysian residents, our internship came to a swift end. Nour was surprised at how quickly this country, so different from what she’s known between America and the Middle East, welcomed her into the fold, while Khalisah was happy to find her weak Malay language skills flourish and grow alongside her appreciation of Malaysian pop culture.

Leaving Malaysia and its mamaks, where we spent our time discovering different ways of viewing and living in the world, is difficult. But we leave knowing that we have a road back there, and Malaysian experiences that we will take with us, wherever else we may go.

All Roads and Rails Lead to KL

Seven different hands, of different shades and different sizes gripped the grimy silver pole of the morning commuter, and Khalisah’s hand was lost in the middle. Bodies pressed against each other with every jostle of the train, and Nour struggled to pull her own hand out of the awkward position it was in – squashed between a pole and another woman’s stomach. Everyone stood as still as possible, almost holding their breath to maintain their personal space. Sweat beaded people’s foreheads, turned their collars dark and made the poles slippery to hold. We looked at the clocks on our cell phones: only half an hour to go.

This is a typical journey for us now, starting any time from 7.15 to 8.30 - depending on how punctual our train decides to be. After a series of trial and error, this claustrophobic commuter was deemed champion of the Malaysian public transport system. For weeks, we had been searching for the “Sweet Spot”— the correct combination of transport to get us to and from work as efficiently as possible. To find the perfect way to work and back home, we had to try every mode of public transport available to the average Malaysian.

The first thing we tried was the KL Rapid, the air-conditioned wonder of the streets of Malaysia. After over a week of different bus trials and combinations, we now know that 5.30 p.m. to 7 p.m. are the worst times to be on the road, because we’ve sat on those KL Rapids for hours, watching their public service commercials play on loop from the high plastic chairs. We know that to escape morning gridlock, we need to leave the house at least a quarter to 7 a.m., unless we want to spend hours stopped in front of a school watching little Asian kids bounce around in their white sneakers as their parents drop them off.

This means waking up at 6 a.m., getting breakfast to go from the nearby mamak (ice coffee in little plastic bags with a straw to drink out of), being on the correct street corner before the bus arrives, sitting through anywhere from one-and-a-half to two hours of traffic (if we’re lucky enough to not be forced to change buses halfway through our trip), trugging from the KL bus stop to our office building, and still getting to work ten minutes late. It also means leaving the office at 6 p.m. to retrace our morning steps, often getting home at 8 or 9 in the evening.

We quickly realized that this system wasn’t exactly efficient. Next, we tried car pooling with a neighbor, but our schedules were too different to mesh well. After that, we tried to take a bus to the nearest train station, but a trip to the station that should have taken no more than ten minutes took over half an hour as we shuttled from stop to stop before getting to our destination. That’s not worth it, we decided. We’ll give up the irresistible one-ringgit-thirty-cents bus fare for an eight ringgit cab ride to the station - which was worth it. We made a deal with a soft-spoken pak cik (uncle), who would pick us up every morning at 7 a.m. in his battered yellow taxi, entertaining us with everything from Quranic verses to the latest Katy Perry hit on his radio.

Once we started taking the train, we found ourselves right in the middle of the claustrophobic scene we described above. But after a few days on the KTM, we discovered a little trick that offered some comfort: by getting on the last carriage of the train, we could avoid the jam-packed front carriages in favor of a place where we could each have a few precious inches of air to ourselves – something we’d never previously considered as a privilege.

In the end, we don’t consider all those hours on the road and rail a waste of our time, but an investment. We’ve come out of our dizzying first four weeks in Malaysia as experts of KL. We know that there’s a Church of Our Lady Fatima opposite the La Salle school; that Chow Kit looks like a red light district, even in the day; that graffiti is surprisingly popular on just about every available wall in the city; and that the ponds and grasses that cover Malaysia can be beautiful even at the sleepiest hours of the morning.

We know even better the kinds of people you meet (or jostle by or crash land into) on the country’s trains and busses. Usually they’re just people who want to get to work without hassle, but sometimes they’re the guy with the earphones blasting Rihanna, or the tattooed Chinese gangster with the freshly stitched cuts on his face. Other times they’re two rough-looking travelers who, in our minds, can be nothing but Indonesian pirates – or very convincing Jack Sparrow look-alikes. Still other times they’re school kids in uniform, mothers taking their toddlers to see grandma, or a band of traveling musicians.

No matter how lost or delayed we got on our trips, we soon discovered that all roads and rails lead to Kuala Lumpur. With that in mind, we stopped worrying about when we’d get to wherever we were going and learned to enjoy the trip, watching people, places and life pass through our train or outside our window. On the Malaysian public transport system we realized that, sometimes, the journey is just as important as the destination.

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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.

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.

Welcome to the Mamak

“My folks aren’t too cool about me interning in a potential war-zone,” Nour said with a shrug at the dinner table.

“You should go to Malaysia then! We have NGOs there, too!” said Khalisah’s mom eagerly. Khalisah and Nour exchanged a look of interest that conveyed the possibility of working and living together in a vibrant city; a look that glinted with the opportunity of independence, new people, unintelligible languages, spicy food, wacky culture and –

“Argh!” Khalisah flinched. “We haven’t even looked into anything in Malaysia together! The deadline for internships is a few weeks away! It’ll never happen.” Nour continued to smile. “It’ll never happen, Nour.” The smile got wider. Khalisah narrowed her eyes as she said, “I’ll believe it when I see the plane tickets.”

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Hi, we’re Khalisah Stevens and Nour Merza, the authors of the Mamak Chronicles.  At the end of last spring semester (in between paper deadlines, exams and failed fax machines in Syria) we found ourselves hanging in internship limbo. Our university requires all third-year students to get a summer of training with an approved organization – without such an internship, we would not be able to graduate with our classmates the following year. As our deadline was fast approaching, our chances of getting an internship were fast receding. We were about to resign ourselves to a sweltering summer in Dubai when an email came through.

“It is with great pleasure that we inform you of your acceptance into the Mercy Malaysia Internship Program for the summer of 2009.”

We were psyched.

Mercy Malaysia is a non-profit organization that provides immediate relief to crisis situations around the world. With a background in international relations, we were both interested in aid work, and Mercy Malaysia’s credentials put it right up our street. The organization has projects going on across the globe, from Indonesia and Sri Lanka to Afghanistan and Iraq. Suddenly, our new theme song was “You got me begging you for Mercy, yeah, yeah!” We couldn’t wait to get started.

A few weeks later, we found ourselves in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, battling train, bus and taxi to make our way to and from the office; a process that begins every day at six a.m. and can end as late as nine p.m. Tiring? Yes.

Luckily for us, we find solace in the marvel that is the mamak. Found on every street corner, mamak stalls are greasy havens that provide locals and tourists alike a place to eat, congregate, and watch the latest match between Barcelona and Manchester United. It is in these mamaks where we begin our day with yawns and egg roti chennai, and end our evenings rehashing the events of the last fourteen hours amid the warm bustle of waiters taking orders, cats scavenging for scraps under tables, and motorcycles beeping as they zip by.

These nighttime discussions gave birth to the Mamak Chronicles. So pull up a chair, order a round of cool teh ais, and follow the accounts of our adventures – and misadventures – in Malaysia.