Sylvia's Journal

We celebrated the end of our assignment in the Buku Bintang area of KL. First we went to the whiskey bar. We ordered samplers of several half ounce glasses (I tried the Japanese collection) and then walked to Alor street to sample KL street food:  durian, sweet yellow and spicy green mango, crayfish and other fish and meat on bamboo skewers, fresh coconut milk, coconut ice cream and much more.

At breakfast we said goodbye to T. who should have landed in Sri Lanka by now. We packed up, did a rather stupid walk at the hottest part of the day in a rather tepid park, took a cab to our new digs, the majestic Majestic Hotel. We splurged by buying the upgrade special for 75 dollars a night which put us in the original Majestic building, feeling like we landed in the days of the Raj. the British left their fingerprints all over the place. The upgrade came with breakfast (apparently quite a spread), an English tea at 5, cocktails at 6, free laundry, free minibar contents and our own butler. After a week of mediocrity and too many Chinese for company in the Best Western, we felt like royalty. We have now a 2 room suite with plenty of horizontal surfaces to spread our belongings; it’s a relief after our dormitary style Best Western roomlet with its tiny desk and twin beds, and hardly any space to manoeuver.

We visited the nearby Textile museum, Axel for the second time, and learned about the many inventive ways that the Malay have adorned their bodies and heads with the most amazing textiles and hats. I don’t understand how these textile techniques work, let alone how they were invented, but for Axel the silk painter, it was all very illuminating.

Tomorrow we will sample the breakfast buffet which will no doubt be an improvement on our breakfast experience of the last few days. At 9 a driver will pick us up to go tho Malaka, a place of great historical interest, some two hours south of KL.

On Wednesday we started the stakeholder meeting – also part of WHO’s Wheelchair Services Training Package (WSTP).  We had expected 50 people but some 35 showed up. We had vendors (wheelchairs are not manufactured locally but imported and assembled here), academics, organizations of people with disabilities and practitioners in the room. We did not have anyone from the central or state governments, nor from the disability rights commission, unfortunately. This is, according to our participants, a symptom. For me it was a missed opportunity. But then again, I remember Harrison Owen Open Space principle: who ever are there are the right people.

We brought the abstract notion of a shared vision to life using a type of airy modeling dough and letting people dream about a barrier free Malaysia.  The modeling dough was sent all the way from China to the US and then carried in checked luggage back to the Chinese neighborhood.  We told people to use all the resources in the room, and they did: the modeling dough, paper, glasses, water bottles and markers. The creations were great.

The visions depicted wheelchair access in 2025 in Malaysia, ranging from  high touch to high tech and everything in between. They then worked backwards and acted out scenarios (in song and mime) that got us from 2016 to 2025. The themes that we identified had to do with standards and guidelines (there are none now), training (there are just a handful of trained wheelchair providers in the country now), teams responsible for strategy development in the hospitals (there are no such teams nor services now), public awareness (there is little of this), stakeholder collaboration (all silo-ed now) and resource development (there has not been much of collective effort to increase funding). The last step in the process brought stakeholders together around areas of common interest, influence, roles and/or expertise. Usually at this point the interest and energy wanes – partially because people are tired but more importantly because I insist that each activity proposed has to have the name of a person willing to take responsibility and lead the effort. But with this group there was none of this. Later, when we reflected on the two days and I asked them where they had felt ‘in the flow’ they mentioned both the dreaming and the activity planning; a first in my experience.

Although it is not, as I was told, rainy season, the moment we arrived the monsoons started – thunder, lightning and downpours I have never seen descended on us daily. Since we were in a conference room it didn’t matter to us, except for the breaks which are offered on the hotel’s 15^th floor rooftop, next to the pool. The pool would overflow for a while and then everything dries up again. The Malay are very happy about this rain – the draught had reached panic levels. Here, like in Afghanistan, water brings luck. For the most part it is hazy in this otherwise lush tropical paradise. Most of the time we cannot see far from our 13^th floor room.

We started on Monday with the management training of people who run either Occupational Therapy services or facilities and who are planning to add wheelchair services to their repertoire. ideally this training is for managers of staff who have just completed the practical training on how to deliver wheelchair services. This is what my colleague T does before I join her.

Through the WHO program people are learning that wheelchair service delivery is more than giving a wheelchair to a person. It includes extensive diagnostic interviews, measurements, wheelchair adaptations & fitting and user training. Few of the 20 participants were actually in management positions (they rarely are in these trainings) and so much of the management content was quite new to them, as was the wheelchair service process.

I have never worked in a middle-income country and I don’t know how they managed to get USAID funding which is usually reserved for low income countries. The difference in attitude is striking: there is no expectation that some outside funder will take care of everything – there isn’t the helplessness (we are poor we cannot help ourselves) that I see so commonly elsewhere. The enthusiasm, the gratitude for this opportunity was striking, and so was the realization that there is money, and that getting it to expand services is possible albeit it difficult.

We divided up the sessions between the three of us and adapted the fixed curriculum to the context. Usually we do this training in a country that has a language and script we do not know. This makes changes nearly impossible as we would need to get translators to make the changes on the slides and the kind of spur of the moment changes I tend to do are not possible. It was a luxury to teach in English and be able to read the slides. It also allows me to put in some leadership content which I can never do in the other settings.

I arrived in cork dry Malaysia in the afternoon. With hand luggage only I was off the plane, getting through immigration and finding my driver in 12 minutes. It’s  an easy country to get into, compared to others where the lines are long and the paperwork considerable.

Axel waited for me in the lobby of the hotel. He had arrived the night before. We are staying in the Best Western in Petaling Jaya, a suburb of KL. It is enormous and sells itself as a ‘midclass iconic.’  We haven’t figured out the iconic part. The ‘midclass’ part is obvious. It caters mostly to Chinese travelers who are easily recognized by their moving as flocks and very loud voices. We quickly learned to avoid the elevators when a new batch came in.

On Sunday we met with the team, my colleague S. who had flown in from DC and T. from Sri Lanka who had already spent 3 weeks here teaching occupational therapists how to fit wheelchairs for children and adults with a variety of serious physical disabilities. As usual, the before and after pictures were moving: lives are changed for the better.

I have never quite understood Malaysia – there is a part of the country on a faraway island (which I was taught in school is called Borneo – the same island that also houses Brunei). There is Singapore which is on the same peninsula but a city-state all by itself, and there are states, represented in the flag (that looks like the American flag) by stripes.

The food here is quite familiar, similar to the Indonesian cuisine I know so well. Malaysia and Indonesia are like first cousins, close cousins with regard to food and language, more distant culturally depending on which Indonesian island you compare with.  I recognize words that have been integrated in the Dutch language due to some overlapping history.

Although I had just been travelling for more than 24 hours, we decided to go into town (KL) and get at a taste of this place – something hard to get in and around our hotel in the suburbs.  Axel had done his Lonely Planet research and took me to the Old China Cafe in the Chinese quarter. We used Uber and the light rail system which was our first and very positive close encounter with Malaysian society.  We did get a taste of the undercurrents that are stirring up discontent on this peninsula. The Malakka-born traveler next to me nodded indignantly at the young girl sitting on my other side (Bangla, or Indian) who did not stand up for grey-haired Axel while a young Malay boy did. “See,” she said, “these people are no good.” It was the first of several whiffs we got of such attitudes.

I was quite surprised about the pervasive influence of Islam here. I knew Malaysia (like Indonesia) is mostly Muslim but I had expected something a bit more secular (remembering my brief visit to Indonesia in 1989). We are finding something else. Older people have told us the change is slow but persistent – conservative Islam is on the rise. Most women are wrapped up from head to toe in cloth and fashion lines advertise subtle variations on the basic theme: hijab, long dress, long-sleeved tunic.  Some men will not shake hands with women.