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Thursday

TAMPARULI : My first field trip

In UMS, Every first year student is required to choose one activity for their curriculum credit. This activity will only be carried out for one semester (provided you pass). So being all "adventurous" I decided even before i came to sabah that i would take anyting that has to do with the sabahan dance also known as Tarian Sabah. And true enough they had Tarian Sabah in our curriculum activities. And... I went for it.

I honestly thought it'll be fun and significant for my course. And it was. But it also meant serious business. We had to learn 5 different types of the sabahan dance, like Tarian Mangunatip, Tarian Sumazau, Tarian Daling-daling and so on + the music that was used + little bit of history + the technical side for 3 hours every saturday. 3 hours seemed pretty short but honestly they felt like the longest 3 hours of my life (excluding French classes). Now this is coming from someone who had never had any professional dance experience in her life, so do excuse the complains. Okay so back to the topic, in every curriculum group, we are required to come up with a community project called the UMS SPRINT. This project must be under the budget of RM500 and will serve as your mid-exam evaluation.

Our section came up with a bengkel seni in Kampung Raganan Kiulu, Tamparuli. This was my first experience going to a village. Coming from Ipoh I couldn't picture what it was like to be in a village where that was a village chief and how the people would actually come together and participate in activities like the one we were about to host for them. Back in my neighbourhood, it was every house for itself. So this was going to be a new experience for me and i was pretty excited. We stayed in an open-aired  village hall and had only one outdoor bathroom stall to bath/answer the call of nature at. There were no fans/lights in the hall and the only lights we had were battery operated. Overall it was a good trip, where we hosted games for the village kids and adults and taught them one of the dance which we learned- The Mangunatip dance from the Bajau ethnic. It was a good way to just put the phones away and get out and be a kid again,


The long bridge that you had to cross to get to the Village. Scary bah.

The village's open-aired hall aka our bedroom


The village's kindergarten 



The villagers trying out the Bajau traditional wear

Our group picture was taken by the river :D


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