It was a tough decision - choosing between going for the
SABM roadshow in East Malaysia or going for this trip down to Kuala Pilah to visit a family of rubber tappers.
Perhaps you’ll call me a
katak di bawah tempurung - a severe case of living in a bubble and not knowing what happens - not on the other side of the world but - just approximately 130km south of Kuala Lumpur.
The truth is, I didn’t know rubber tappers still existed.
I knew there was a huge demand for rubber early last century, but the textbooks I owned when I was still languishing in secondary school told me that it dropped drastically when synthetic rubber emerged.
Evidently, there is still a demand, and rubber tappers still harvest latex everyday.
The group I was with was organizing a camp for the children of the rubber tappers, and I had been recruited as the games mistress (ahem) cum arts & crafts director. Okay, I flatter myself with fancy titles, but it’s the truth.
I was also recruited to do a number of odd jobs, one of which was registration. Yes, this group I work with certainly knows how to squeeze every bit of manual labour out of innocent souls and in return, I seem to be a glutton for punishment.
But I digress.
Registration was an interesting affair. It involved getting down the details of participants as they showed up and writing down their names on stickers, which functioned as name tags.
Under normal circumstances, that is generally an easy task.
I was to discover that life wasn’t as simple as it looked.
“What’s your name?” I asked the first cheerful participant in Tamil. “Krebfojgwn,” he mumbled.
“How do you spell it?” I asked. I was met with a blank stare. And then he proceeded to spit out a string of letters that did not remotely resemble the name he had stated.
A drop of sweat rolled down my brow. The camp was held at the house of a rubber tapper and her husband who had kindly volunteered their premises.
However, the zinc roof and blazing heat were certainly not a decent combination for a KL born-and-bred, air-conditioned-office employee like Yours Truly.
I later discovered that the abovementioned cheerful participant was named Kajenthiran. He was 10 years old and had 8 living siblings, the youngest of whom was 2 months old. His mother was barely 25 years old.
Did he attend school? I wanted to know. He assured me he did. However, a couple of his brothers didn’t.
“Why?” I probed.
“No letter,” was the simple reply. What that meant, was that his brothers did not have birth certificates and because they didn’t, they were refused admission into school.
They weren’t the only ones. There were a number of adults in their 20s who had neither birth certificates nor identity cards (MYKAD).
What that essentially meant, was while they were born and had lived all their lives in Malaysia - never having ever gone out of the country - they had never made it into the records of the administration.
The government had no clue they existed. More likely, the BN government didn’t even care.
After all, how were a bunch of illiterate rubber tappers of ethnic Indian origin going to ensure BN’s 50-odd years of reign in Malaysia? (and perhaps another 50 to come)
That is why the government wraps itself in copious amounts of red tape to discourage applicants from trying to register after the two-month registration period given for parents to register their children upon birth.
This is not a new issue. The Human Rights Party (founded by Uthayakumar of HINDRAF fame)
rails on and on about this.
Some parents are irresponsible. And some were caught up with issues and failed to make the deadline.
Whatever the reason, it is the constitutional right of every child of Malaysia to own his/her place in the nation. To be
provided education like everyone else.
But these rightful citizens have been denied this right and will continue to be denied as long as both the ruling coalition and the opposition turn a blind eye to their plight.
