Category: General

I (jm) had a consultation with a guy today while he was waiting for a document to be certified, and it started out just like normal. He wasn’t Malaysian, that was clear, and his English was better than mine, but I figured he was just some regular international student. He was asking me why the Malaysian Ministry of Education would not certify his degree from Excelsior College, which he did here in Malaysia through a local college. He needs to get it certified to send off to a potential employer in Dubai. So the Ministry sent him over here, I’m not exactly sure why, and I had to tell him that we don’t know anything about this particular program he did.

Then he lets it slip that he’s from Iraq. He said he literally “fled Saddam” and came here, by himself, 11 years ago when he was 15. He’s been living on his own here ever since, and did high school, college, and now a business degree in Malaysia. I asked where his family was, so he told me his parents are in Jordan, one brother is in Canada, and another brother and sister are in two other countries, I forget now which ones. He said that if I asked about his extended family, though, that he pretty much knows people everywhere in the world. When I told him that it was pretty amazing that he came here alone so young, he told me that he was kind of tired of hearing that from people, and that he didn’t have much of a choice; he had to get out because things were so bad there. I told him that I had met several Middle Easterners here, but no other Iraqis, and he said that most of the Iraqis living here are working class. Anyway, it was interesting, although I have to admit I was a little bit uncomfortable (like, does he hate the US, or should I be apologizing or something?).

This was right after I met a woman from Burma who has been living and working here with her family for 12 years. She’s trying to send her son to, you guessed it, Harvard. But he actually has had an American style education so far and got great SATs- 800 on math, 800 on the new writing, but not so good on the reading section. So she was really nice and was going to be my interesting person of the day, until I met the other guy.

I’m also getting all sorts of weird calls lately that I’m not really qualified to handle because all of the advising staff is now in America and I am on my own. There was a call today from a banking law professor at University of Malaya who is trying to prepare a paper on ways UM can attract more international students. So I have no idea, but I gave her a few sentences with the right buzzwords and she seemed happy. I think “get your faculty members to publish more in international journals and become more involved in the international academic community” went over pretty well. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that UM needs to stop losing all its best professors to other countries because they speak out honestly about the government here. That would probably be a good place for UM to start.

(Nota Bene: This post will not be particularly gross or anything, but it will discuss toilets.  So, avert your eyes if you sensitive.)

The traditional toilet in Southeast Asia is not the kind that Americans are used to.  Rather, the traditional toilet (at least in Indonesia and Malaysia) is a hole in the floor with two footprints next to it.  The idea is that you put your feet on the footprints, squat, and do your business.  For us as Americans, it’s really not our favorite experience.  It’s really the squatting part–unless you are very flexible, it’s not really that easy.  Very hard on the knees, you know.  And it’s also kind of difficult if you are wearing pants.  Just try it, you’ll see what we mean.  In fact, we have not really figured how to make sure that you don’t get a little messy without just taking off your pants entirely and hanging them somewhere.  Maybe that’s the explanation for the breeziness of local clothes, sarongs and stuff.

We should note that such toilets are not particularly Southeast Asian.  I (TP) have seen them in Turkey and even in Greece.

Interestingly, for all of our discomfort at using them, many people in Malaysia and Indonesia are uncomfortable using the Western style of toilet.  We had never given this much thought before we came here, but it is kind of gross to let your legs rest on a toilet seat.  I’m sure that all of us have felt the need, some time or another, to lay down a little toilet paper liner.  So we’ve had some silly experiences.  For example, most bathrooms in Malaysia have one of each kind of toilet: one Western, one local.  When the Western one is occupied, we have a dilemma, because we’d normally just prefer to wait until it’s free rather than use the local kind.  So unless it’s an emergency, we normally end up just hanging out in the bathroom looking like fools while locals come and go.  What is really silly is when Malays do not want to use the Western style.  JM, being a woman, has more experience at this than I do…you’re more likely to get a line in a ladies’ room, you know.  It ends up that both she and a Malay woman will be waiting for a toilet, neither one wanting to use the one that the other one wants to use.  (Also complicating matters is the fact that here women line up for the particular stall, and don’t have a general line like we are used to in the States.  So it becomes quite a guessing game because the different stalls are not labelled.  If you get in the wrong line, you lose!  -jm)

OK, but here’s the funniest part.  Sometimes a local will use a Western toilet like a local toilet, squatting while perched precariously on the seat.  This leads to very very dirty, and scuffed, toilet seats.  In the bathroom at UM, there’s a funny sign.  (Can’t take a picture, no cameras allowed in the library.)  It says, "Please do not stand on the toilet when using, you might fall and break the seat and your head."  That’s classic.