Previously, the missionary had found himself swept up in the strange calm after the Brunei Rebellion, watching soldiers come and go through Seria as if war and parish life had somehow been folded into the same ordinary day. He had seen bravery, confusion, humour and faith all mixed together, from stern matrons turning rebels away to Highland soldiers clattering into Mass with helmets and rifles, and though peace seemed to be returning, he knew the place had changed. Still, with his usual curiosity and a touch of mischief, he kept moving from mission house to airstrip to Miri, gathering stories, meeting army chaplains and Catholic officers, and quietly realising that this missionary journey was carrying him far beyond anything he had expected.
I was gloriously happy in Seria. I loved the schoolwork and the parish activities. I had been “blooded”- as it were-through being there during the Rebellion. But Miri Vicariate was essentially involved in work in the interior among the native peoples. I wanted to be among it. I was reaching out for fresh fields. I did what was hardly possible in the old days before the Vatican Council. I expressed this wish to the bishop. To my relief and delight, he assigned me after my home leave to Marudi, the oldest mission station in his territory, several hours’ travel by boat up the Baram River.
Before the discovery of oil, Marudi was the focal point for the vast hinterland of the Baram River, which flowed from high up in the Kelabit Mountains bordering on Kelamantan in Indonesia down to the South China Sea. Here the Brooke administration stationed the Resident of the Fourth Division; it had been able to calm the warring tribes of Kayan and Kenyahs and had persuaded them to accept the rule of the foreigners. By my time, its glory had long since departed. The Brookes had gone; Sarawak was now a component state of Malaysia and the town itself was but part of the hinterland of Miri, from which it was reached by a tedious four-hour trip on a Chinese launch. It sprang into life sporadically as the fortunes of the up-river timber camps improved. Goods were brought in from Miri to supply the shops and the few Chinese businessmen who tried to make a living from the longhouses. The town sat on the river’s edge; its roads petered out as the jungle fought back tenaciously. Its ancient fort, or stockade, which had seen ferocious battles, was now a guesthouse where the District Officer would entertain officially. Nearby was one of the oldest buildings, nearing its centenary, the Church of the Good Shepherd; adjacent was an elderly primary school which catered for the Chinese children from town and the native children from upriver who were boarders. The Little Sisters of St Francis cared for the young children of both sexes and the bigger girls. The mission looked after the big boys.
The mission house was quite new and imposing but it was a most uncomfortable place to live in. The plans had been borrowed from other missions; the fact that these houses proved to be very hot and uncomfortable did not stop the authorities from forging ahead. The saving grace of the old mission houses was that they had bilian atap roofing and big verandahs. Lack of space and finance operated against these facilities. These modern houses would have been ideal if air-conditioning had been possible; the tropical sun beat down relentlessly on good and bad alike.
The nature of bureaucracy is such that it never seems to diminish. Although Marudi was not the town it used to be, the new state of Malaysia saw to it that each government department had an abundant supply of officials. Previously to this, the District Officer seemed to administer the whole place and the upriver longhouses more or less on his own with the help of a few officers; now he was but a figurehead as the various departments came into being with their own hierarchies of specialists.
I was very friendly with the District Officer; he was nearing the end of his working life which had begun under the Brookes and he loved to chat with me for it was obvious that he felt at home with Europeans. Apart from the mission staff, there were no other foreigners in town. I would greet him with exaggerated gestures of obeisance, befitting a District Officer. He would lament to me that he was just there to preside at state occasions and meals; all the real power was now in the hands of the heads of departments. Which of course was true and inevitably so.
Like every good Moslem, he had the ambition to go to Mecca on pilgrimage. We saw him of with genuine expressions of good will. We were dismayed later to learn that he had taken very ill and it was months before he was able to take up his work again. It was not uncommon for Malays from Sarawak and Brunei to fall victims to the poor hygiene and sanitation. Several told me that they actually feared that they were going to die so primitive were the conditions they experienced. Our Sunday congregation consisted of the Chinese townspeople, government officers, the schoolchildren and the pupils of the big government secondary school which catered also for the natives from upriver. When I arrived in Marudi, I was thrilled at the prospect of working from Marudi and caring for the Iban longhouses in the area and the houses of the Kenyah and Kayan stretching far upriver into the interior. But, as the pundits are so fond of saying, there was a hidden agenda.
There was also a secondary school run by the mission and it needed a headmaster! Being a bishop is not easy. Bishop Galvin was a very apostolic man and he knew his vicariate intimately. There was a lot of work to be done in our area but the labourers were few. The parish priest, young and vigorous, had a multitude of tasks, ranging from the distribution of flour and wheat from the American Catholic Relief Services, to caring for the boys in the mission boarding house, teaching catechism in the government school. In a parish the immediacy and urgency of the ties binding the priest to the centre are often much stronger than the call to go to the outskirts and spend hours on long journeys getting there and back. It is always difficult to arrange the priorities.
Marudi pioneered a catechist training centre, financed by Misereor, the German Catholic charity. Trainee catechists came from the neighbouring vicariate of Kuching which supplied a priest to assist in the training. The head of the establishment was a Miri priest. Altogether there were four of us. The bishop hoped that somehow with this number, although each one with his own special task, we would manage to evangelise the immediate area of the outskirts of Marudi. Apart from any specific river travel, there were something like 20 Iban longhouses, most of which were still pagan. The bishop wrote to all four of us individually asking us to share in this task.
Today four priests would be more than sufficient to tackle this and successfully. Nowadays the priest is able to shed himself of the tasks which by custom and tradition he and he alone was expected to manage. It is unthinkable today to look back and see that, for example, so many of our men were involved in education, building, that is the physical aspect of building, manual labour. These were the traditional tasks which the priest would never shirk. He did not think to share them with anyone except in the town parishes. Yet at this time, which was the heyday of the Borneo Evangelical Mission, an Australian based Christian fundamentalist group, all its staff were involved directly in evangelising. Practically two whole tribes of the interior, namely the Kelabits and Muruts, were converted by them. Education and medical work did not feature on their agenda. This is not in any way to decry the work of our men; to evangelise is to evangelise the whole man. Our schools and our distribution of wheat and flour among the poor people of Borneo not only saved life but thereafter improved its quality.
