My Promo-mentors Writing Challenge: My Experience at the National Service

Here is my entry for #promomentors-challenge by @futurethinker with this week's theme: an experience that has changed you.

I was thinking if I have any remarkable experience when an old photo fell off my album when I was doing a little cleaning before the Chinese New Year. I ended up admiring my youth and memories of the old flashed back as if they just happened yesterday.

This is me posing with my friend who came to visit.

Okay, I was thinking perhaps I can try to write about an experience 14 years ago (oh my goodness, it makes me feel quite old, really). This post is about my experience as a participant in one of the earliest batch of National Service (PLKN) in my country, Malaysia in 2004.

A little background on the National Service in my country:

Photo credit to Harapan-Besok.

It is not compulsory for everyone and we get selectively drafted, male and female at the age of 17, after we finish high school and before we go further for tertiary education. It is not the same as the National Service in other countries, where we need to be on standby for service should a war break out but rather, it is to encourage us to relate with the different races and ethnic groups we have in Malaysia, empower us to have patriotism and the like. Just for your information, you may refer this site to know how many groups of ethnicity we have in Malaysia.

This National Service program lasts for three months per batch. They allow visitors to visit us during the weekends.

It is a shame that I do not have many photos of this wonderful experience because back then I was still using the filmed camera and the photos which I have developed are not stored at my current home. To walk you through my experience better, I would share some photos from an online blogger, who happened to be my "junior" in the same camp. Hence, all the photos from here onwards are credited to Bao Qiang from her blog site.

Reporting for the Program for My First Month

The name of our campsite - Junaco Park

The scenic campsite

The steep slope to walk everyday to go from the tents to the canteen and from canteen back to the tents

Randomly, I got selected among some many of my friends. I was among the 85000 youths who got selected among 450000 of us in my year. Many of my friends appealed to postpone when they got selected. There were many camps located at different districts of different state. I for one, was sent to another district which is in the same state as my home, Sibu, which is 400 km away from home. My placement was at this beautiful recreational park called the Junaco Park. Lucky for me, my cousin sister whom I wasn't close with before got sent to the same place and also some of my schoolmates.

I travelled for 8 hours by bus and finally we reached the place, only to find out that we were very late, so I had to collect my uniform first, which consists of the army patterned shirt and pants, long sleeve t shirts, boots and a beret hat. I got mine all bigger in size especially my shoes which I needed to stuff tissues in for me to fit. We were divided into different companies namely Alpha, Beta, Charlie and Delta. My name was found under Delta and I got splitted from those I know. We slept on folded beds in huge tents. They purposely arranged for different ethnicity to be sharing a tent, so here I met some of my closer Malay, Bidayuh and Iban friends who especially helped me when I was very sick. Everything was in simplicity and us being the first batch, we were the white lab rats for their trial and errors.

We were given six meals per day, wow! The first month was made up of all kinds of physical activities and classes such as: kayaking, rafting, marching, obstacle courses, flying fox, abseiling etc. We woke up as early as 6 to have our morning assembly. I remember my friends and I would wake up even earlier so we get to use the toilets before the long queue so we would wake up at 430/5am to wash up and went back to sleep. Our camp is rather unique because back then there were still animals like sheep, crocodiles, porcupines fenced up. I was tested to my maximum, because I wasn't a sports person at all. We were exposed and introduced to rifles but in my batch, we were not allowed to handle them by ourselves. Thank God my teammates were very helpful and our cooperation transcends beyond races or religion. I met really nice people here and I did have fun.

Photo credit to Bao Qiang. The toilets and water tub which I remember was always filled with dead crickets.

One of the interesting thing we did was to stay in the jungle overnight with no tent and in the dark. It would have been more fun if it didn't rain like cats and dogs that very night. We had to cover everyone with the limited number of ponchos we had. Yes, we were drenched and soaked, totally!

Another mysterious and spooky experience we encountered was there were many spiritual cases of hysteria and rumours of spiritual possession. They said it was because the officials cut down the forests for our camps and it "angered" the spirits of the forest. There were so many stories from different camps every day. Hmm. I was honestly very terrified and it was a struggle for me to go to sleep every night until I got very sick. I was very sure it was psychosomatic. My friends from the other races took care of me and some who are Christians would pray together. Because of them and also my mom who constantly reminded me of Jesus though she isn't a Christian, I managed to go through this period and lost much weight.

Besides this traumatic experience, I remember still the good days when we would lie down on the grass and joke with our trainers. I met a lot of friends from Peninsular Malaysia who were sent over to Sarawak for this camp.

Photo credit to Bao Qiong. I used to wear these same army-patterned uniform too when I was in Phase 1 of the Program.

The kayak boats used

Rafts made of tires and pipes is one of the activities I enjoyed the most.

Moving On to A Different Venue

Uniform attire for Phase 2 and 3. I used to wear the same uniforms too but this photo belongs to Bao Qiang, my "junior".

In our second month, we were instructed to move to a different place to start Phase 2 and Phase 3 of the Program which is Patriotism Program and Character Building Program respectively. We were given bunk beds to stay in an indoor basketball court where the guys and girls were separated with a huge wall. Every night, we could hear the guys yelling at the girls and there was one particular night before our farewell, the guys started throwing things over to our side when I got hit by a dry cell battery at my throat, ouch! It went even merrier when all started hitting the pails to make music..... Until our trainers came in to warn us to go to sleep, oops 😜

Through Phase 2, I did learn more about the history of my country and we were asked to also visit local villages to learn their culture. I interacted with even more people different from my race and we basically were always laughing together. I didn't have such opportunity before that because though I was enrolled into a local government Malay school, learning everything in the national language, there weren't many Malays or Indians around. Through this program, I have learnt to enjoy them more.

I remember we also learnt juggling in Phase 3 for fun as our trainer knew how to. In order to make our lessons more interesting, she taught us the skill. There were also many fun naughty moments when I followed my best friend to "skip" class and somehow we managed to escape the attention of our trainers.

Learning From This Three-Months Experience

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I really wish I would remember more things about this different experience that I had. Some of my peers were thankful that they did not get selected. I dreaded about it at first for being so "unlucky" but now that I look back, I am quite proud I did it and did not escape from it. It did help me relate better with the other races and ethnics, respecting them and mingling with them like my own kind. We may speak different languages but we were so willing to be there for each other, though we were literally strangers at first. We ate each other's food, played and fooled around with each other, laid down our lives to work together to accomplish many small projects together and especially the heavy rain night when we had to stay out but we tried our best to cover each other with what we had. It is a humbling and life-changing experience, if you ask me. When I hear some of my friends talk about the other races, I sometimes would sense them looking down at them but after going through the National Service Program, I did not turn out to be a combat fighter but perhaps a little more compassionate to those who aren't the same as me. I think we did successfully learnt to persevere through hardships and don't easily give up, as part of the very important character building too.

The beauty of diversity: We can have differences and work together towards the same objectives.

Our diversity is our strength. What a dull and pointless life it would be if everyone was the same. ~Angelina Jolie Source

Oh yeah, I also went home as dark as a charcoal after being under the sun more than ever in those three months.

References:

• http://baoqionglife.blogspot.my/2008/06/memories-in-kem-plkn-junaco-park-sibu.html?m=1

• https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/ethnic-groups-of-malaysia.html

• http://harapan-esok.blogspot.my/2014/08/kurikulum-plkn-perlu-diubah-selaras.html?m=1

Disclaimer: Besides the first photo, the other photos belong to Bao Qiang, Harapan-besok and not mine. Thank you for reading my experience as a non-combat National Service participant. Hope the story didn't bore you, hehe.

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