Tawau's Got Talent

I remember reading what the Lonely Planet guide to Borneo has to say about Tawau. I bought it just before moving here, and was a little disappointed to find this description of my prospective home:

Despite the progress, desolate pockets remain after dark. Particularly around the local bus terminus, dog packs are big and loud enough to cause distress, and street lighting could use an upgrade. But what's really missing there at night are people.

The lure for travellers is the border: Tawau is the only crossing point with Kalimantan where foreigners can get a visa to enter Indonesia.

The last part isn't true. I tried to get into Kalimantan twice and failed. You need a Visa, and they're not easy to get. Or maybe that was just me. But I certainly remember feeling somewhat disappointed by what I found when I arrived. Up to this point, I had been familiar with Malaysia's tourist hotspots. The most provincial experience I had had of Malaysia had been Kuching, Sarawak, and I had loved that so much that I thought living in Sabah would be a cinch.

I suppose I can admit now that it really wasn't. While I loved much about it, and still do love it, Tawau was a difficult place for a foreigner to live. The chief reason is that there are simply no other foreigners here. I can distinctly remember the few times that I have seen any other orang putih (that means "white men", rather than a type of monkey) here. I saw a few the other day at Taman Bukit Tawau. It was a novelty. While you might find that in the bigger cities, even in Kota Kinabalu, you can live a relatively western life just with spicy food and exotic, tropical surrounds, Tawau does not afford these luxuries. Here, you are thrown into life with few of your protective mechanisms. You may not realise on the surface how different this place will be to live in, but you'll learn quickly enough once you are here long enough to need routine and familiarity.

One issue, I think, in a place like this is the attitude of the locals towards their own town. Some love it, some view it with contempt and can't wait to get out. Others simply don't know any different. For someone who has lived in many different places and now lives in one of the more cosmopolitan and advanced cities of the world, I view complacency a little critically. I don't think this is necessarily a good thing, since it brings with it much that is unreasonably judgmental. Still, there is much to be said for knowing other ways of living. I have come, for instance, to love the upbringing I have had because, knowing of lives other than my own, I have learnt to see the value of what I have. Many of the people I see daily in Tawau are teenagers, and many of them, by virtue of youth, long for another life. I remember being much the same as a teenager busting to get out of Drouin.

The real challenge for Tawau, and for Malaysia in general, is for people who leave for education and broadening of experience to return, to come back to their home with love and the kind of civic-mindedness which governments can promote but only the heart can produce.

When I think of how I should pray for this country when I return to Australia in less than a week, I suspect this is a very good prayer to pray: that there would be more and more Malaysians who love their home, not because they don't know any different, but because they see the value of home, and see the good that they can do for their people.

It's also a prayer that can be prayed for every cosmopolitan city, where travel and self-development are valued much more highly than staying put and working for the good of your home. We can all learn, I think, what it is to seek to bless not yourself but your home, to hold in tension the problems you see and the love you have for the place. It is a tension, I suspect, best achieved by the grace of a God in whom we always have a higher calling, a higher Home.