Director's Quarters in IPG Keningau I Once Called my "Second Home"

It has been fourteen years since my wife retired as Director of IPG Keningau in 2011. Of all the places on campus, the Director’s quarters is perhaps the one I feel most deeply connected to. For three memorable years, from 2008 to 2011, this was the place she called “home.”

By then, our family home was already a quieter one. All three of our children had left the nest - the older two building their careers overseas, and our youngest pursuing university studies abroad. Our family home, therefore, became a space of quiet evenings and solitary mornings.

Many of her predecessors - particularly the female Directors - had chosen not to live alone, often inviting a few trusted students to occupy the spare rooms and provide companionship at night. My wife, however, decided otherwise. She chose to stay alone - a decision that, in hindsight, revealed not only her independence but also her quiet courage. It was a choice that reflected both her strength of character and her willingness to embrace solitude with grace.

During her tenure, my weekdays were spent alone in Kota Kinabalu. She would return home on Friday evenings and leave again as early as 5 a.m. on Monday. Whenever her official duties kept her in Keningau over the weekends, I preferred to travel there and spend those days with her. The 115-kilometre drive from Kota Kinabalu to Keningau became a familiar ritual - sometimes setting off at 5:30 p.m., other times as late as 8.00 p.m.

The journey itself was often an adventure: sometimes driving through sudden tropical downpours, at other times navigating the mist-shrouded bends of the Crocker Range where visibility dropped to less than ten feet, or cruising along the winding roads deep into the night. Each trip had a single, cherished purpose - to spend those precious days with her in that modest “home.”

By God’s grace, I always arrived safely and returned without mishap, spared from accidents or harm, and deeply grateful for every moment we could share. Equally remarkable was that my wife too travelled that same challenging route countless times without a single incident - another quiet blessing we never took for granted.

On 8 August 2025, I once again found myself standing before that old quarters - now home to the current Director. My last visit was in 2019, six years ago, when my former high school classmate, Ah Miao, returned from Hong Kong and we stopped by for a brief walk down memory lane (Read here).

With the current Director who now lives in the quarters.
He too will be retiring in 11 months' time. Another new Director
will take over and become the new resident of the quarters.

This time, I was struck by how little had changed. The structure stood as it always had, its mild orange walls seemingly untouched by the passing years - exactly as they were in 2008, when my wife first reported for duty here. Even the familiar contours of the building seemed to whisper, “I’m still here.”

Over the past forty years since the college first opened, many directors have passed through these doors - each arriving with a sense of purpose, each eventually leaving through retirement or transfer. The quarters have quietly borne witness to it all: evenings of quiet rest after long days, laughter shared with visiting family, moments of solitude between duties, and the unspoken farewells when it was time to move on.

Standing there, I felt the weight of its history. People come and go, but the place remains - a silent keeper of stories, holding within its walls the echoes of lives once lived here, including ours.