Getting to Know a Bit of The Family Root

My DIL was fascinated by the booklet on my maternal "family tree" compiled by a Muslim uncle of mine (Read here). My extended family has over the years become both multi-racial and multi-religious through inter-marriages with people of other ethnicities. Among the members of Christian faith, we have relatives who are Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Seven-Day Adventists and BCCM/Lutherans.

Earlier, I promised my granddaughter Livvie that I would take her to have a peep at the track that I once used to access my childhood home built in a valley next to Jalan Istana (Read here) and (Read here).

I could not be certain how my granddaughter felt when she first stepped onto the steep trail that day on 11 March 2024. To me, it's truly amazing that after three-quarter of a century after my grandfather and his son built the village house in the late 1940's, family members of the 3rd, 4th and 5th generations were able together set foot on this very place where I was born.

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We continued our journey and visited my old school premise situated at the end of Jalan Pinggir. This is the third visit since the CNY of this year. My son Paul and his wife visited on 8 February 2024 (Read here) and followed by the second visit with my former classmates on 18 February 2024 (Read here).

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Coincidentally, in one of the evening excursions provided for hotel guests of Shangri-La Rasa Ria, we were led to a traditional hut made of bamboo along the way to look for birds, snakes and animals. This small hut is similar to the bamboo house my grandmother and her family used to stay in Kampong Pulutan way back in the mid to late 1900's (Read here).

The small hut built in the hotel premise houses the Kulintangan, a traditional music instrument of the indigenous people - Kadazandusun and Bajau. This is an idiophone comprising of six to nine brass kettle gongs of different pitches arranged on a low wooden frame, whereby the gong rest on strings of rattan.

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In this short holidays, my DIL was keen to savour tarap - a fruit that is native of Borneo. At my childhood village house, there were plenty of tarap trees grown at the vicinity. In fact, the long wire antenna connected to our family old radio was suspended with either end tied to a tarap tree. You can imagine how "connected" my family at the village house was with tarap.

Typical wire antenna tied to roof tops and typical old radio

Furthermore, tarap trees were also one of the numerous other fruit trees planted in my grandmothers' house in Kampong Pulutan. 

Unfortunately our attempt to buy tarap was futile because it's not tarap season at that time. For my granddaughter, Livvie, she has no re-collection of her eating tarap in her September 2019 trip to KK when shown the photos of her eating the fruit (Read here).  This is understandable because she was too young to remember. She was just two and half years old then!

Photos of tarap tree and fruit downloaded from Internet.