A Star Swimmer

Fraidden Dewan, 22, is an Iban, a Sea Dayak from Sarawak’s 20 indigenous groups.

He is the star swimmer of the Sarawak team that is in Kuala Lumpur for the

14^th paralimpiad games, 3 to 9 May.

Eight years ago, when he was helping his father cut down a tree, in his village,

Mukah, near Sibu, he slipped on wet grounds while the tree was crushing down.

The tree fell on his lower left leg and crushed it. It had to be amputated.

He only took up swimming as a sport for the disabled in 2002 and since then

he has been selected to be part of the national team. He is in individual as well

as team events and he is here to show his swimming skills. Catch him and his

team mates in action at the Bukit Jalil sport complex today.

One of his problem outside the swimming pool is the difficulty of getting a

job in his town or near by Kuching. He is now a father of a two year old son

and has a young family to support.

At the moment he lives his family and his father is an odd job worker and the

family income is not predictable. What he wished for, at the moment, is to get

some professional training and to get a good job and to continue swimming and

may take part in the Olympics, in the future.

Last photo: from the left, Fraidden, Stanley, Zam, Zul Amirul

Malaysian Paralympics

The 14^th. Malaysian paralympic games is on -3 to 9 of May – in various sporting avenues in and around Kuala Lumpur. There are more then a thousand athletes, from all over the country, gathering for this biannual sporting event.

Some of the athletes are competing for the first time and this experience of doing their sport, at the national stadiums, whether they win or lose, will add to their personal pride and also that of their family and community. Many are veterans in the games and they are here to show their self-worth.

Beside the competitive spirit in the games there is also the friendship and sharing of personal and sporting experiences among the disabled athletes. They are all housed in the sporting village in Bangi area, near to the Bukit Jalil sports complex, where most of the track and field and swimming events will take place.

This sporting event means a great deal to the disabled groups who have all trained hard over the years to show off their skills and competence. However this sporting event sadly does not get the media coverage it deserved as compared to the more main stream local and international sporting news. This neglect and discrimination by the newspaper and TV stations, to highlight the disabled in sport, lamentably, leads to the public’s lack of information and interest in the other fellow citizens’ sporting culture.

For more information of the games contact (main secretariat) Noraini Mohamad, 013-2027 930, Norimah: 03 2273 9293, Julia: 012 4045 738.

Top photo: Yee Gan Chee from Penang, powerlifting; Bottom photo: Ahmad Amil from Kuala Lumpur getting ready to show his strength.

Gratitude to our ancestors

The first week of April, during the annual remembrance festival, my cousins and I went to visit the graves of our relatives (our grand father and mother and uncle). We all recalled in our own ways, our gratitude to our parents and our parent’s parents. We are glad to be here.

Our ancestors, either buried or cremated, not physically with us, silent, but are not forgotten. They are still alive in our mind. I guess, in their spirit world, they too are seeking out their missing ones, dead or life, in their own form, to tell stories about themselves and to listen to news of other persons or events.

Two years ago, my mother died, in the hospital; she was in a coma for forty days. It was my good fortune, to have my mother, to know her only when she decided to let you into her thoughts, was by her side and to share a house together, almost all her eighty years of life. Of course, there were many times over the years, we each thought the other was unthinking and that we had injured each other, by words and/or deeds, assured that we were not continuing to be together anymore, but then we stayed on anyway.

What I find most amazing is the fact that we have ancestors, relatives, brothers and sisters, not of our choosing, nether did they particularly had any interest in us, but yet we are part of this humanity. We are all related by blood and could reach each other, if we so desire, but often don’t, for mutual comfort, to help each other, to dispel our pains, fears, longings etc.

Keeping the dead alive

April is usually the time of the year when many Malaysian Chinese remember their dead by visiting the grave yard. This is a spring festival with a long tradition from China. This practice of keeping the dead alive takes many forms and expressions through out the world and every society and tribe has their own way of recalling their dead.

This is not ancestor worship like turning our fore fathers and mothers into some kind of gods but just an act to keep them in our mind. Our parents and grand parents are only dead if we stop thinking of them, giving thanks to them, being grateful to them for bring us into this world (sometime not of our own choosing).

Many people believe that the dead can speak on demand and they can have a direct line to their past, but if you don’t, the job of discovering, both the absence and presence simultaneously, of our lost ones, can be a difficult mental space to learn to grasp. For the rest, the usual way to remember our forebears, it may just be an act of conjuring up the thought of them (pleasant or otherwise).

The task is even more complicated if you happen to want to go seeking as far back as whom really our first ancestors were. Our ancient origins may be many many millions of years old, coming out from what is Africa today, to settle in different parts the earth. We may all have mix-blood down the line and are all even distant blood brothers and sisters (at war or at peace).

Greeness & Whiteness

Victor Chin, Pulau Perhentian No.45 (detail), 2007, acrylics on canvas, 85 x 120 cm

This is the latest painting, in the Pulau Perhentian series, which was inspired by the South China Sea, in the east cost of Malaysia and Victor Chin continues to explore the theme with new visual variegations.

This mixture of olive green, light green, light blue, under glazed red and yellow patches is covered over with streaking pale white marks and drippings. The artist, in this work, is letting the shapes, forms and lines shift themselves freely, into submission, in making this abstract construction.

Looking at this artwork, one may be lead, to imagine being in an undersea cave, with millions of stalactites, hanging from the roof of the cave. To others, who have been inside a medieval Islamic building, they may well recall being overwhelmed by the extraordinarily complex coloured tile patterns found on the walls and ceiling of those magnificent structures.

In any case, the pleasure here, is, to see it as what you most like it to be. Enjoy.

A Sea of Red

Victor Chin, Pulau Perhentian No 38 (detail), 2006, acrylics on canvas, 120×85cm

This painting is a sea of semi-transparent red and dark paint marks that may suggest, like the other works in this series, the undersea marine life. If you have seen a school of fish swimming restlessly in the sea, you would have noticed their iridescence colours changes according to the angle they are swimming in and it also changes depending on the angle they are viewed.

This piece of work attempts to convey the agitated and tranquil moments of nature in the sea below. Of course, this picture is a static inanimate object and it requires that the viewer triggers their own imagination to see what the painter is trying to do here.

In the end, some observers may just be interested in the pleasure of looking at the painter’s unique use of lines, shapes, textures and colours and have their own different impression in mind. That is part of the unexpectedness of looking.