An Intro: What a kampung is like

Good day, peeps! We're back again with an actual post about our trip to the Malaysian kampung, or a Malaysian village, to those who aren't familiar with the term kampung.

Mr. Ghazali who gave us some neat facts, albeit reeeally soft and mumbly

Skipping right into when we arrive (there wasn't much on the road to see, so lets cut that out) the first person we met was naturally the ketua kampung (headman of the village ), En. Ghazali (En. is the abbreviation of Encik which means Mister or Mr. in Malay), who was the ketua kampung since 2008, as he was involved with our lecturers in organizing the trip for us. A little note about En. Ghazali: he's a family man with 6 children of his own and is the 5th ketua kampung of Hulu Langat, nominated and chosen through a voting system.

Map showing boundaries of Dusun Tua and its surroundings

What we gathered from him was that there is an organization governing and caring for the village and its people, which is locally known as the JKKK (Jawatankuasa Kemajuan dan Keselamatan Kampung) which literally means the Committee for the Advancement and Safety of the Village, consisting of 15 members including the ketua kampung, En. Ghazali, who, as the head of the said committee, will receive report on every matter that happens in the kampung in order to maintain, well, order in the village.

Map showing elements found in Dusun Tua

Oh, our apologies. We've been babbling about the system of the kampung and we have yet to tell you which kampung exactly we've visited and where it is. So, the kampung that we've visited is Dusun Tua which is a part of Hulu Langat, Selangor, Malaysia. That being made clear, we can now move on to what the kampung was and how it is today, based on the facts that En. Ghazali shared with us and our own personal perception of the place.

Main road flanked by individual houses and forest

Based on the name of the area itself, Dusun Tua, which literally translate to ‘Orchard Old‘ or old orchard, the kampung is somehow related to orchards, fruits or otherwise, given that it is a common naming method of the people of old to name a place according to a commonality throughout the kampung. And by the words of En. Ghazali, the kampung was indeed a site previously filled with fruit orchards and fruit plantation was the major profession of the kampung. Paddy plantation was also one of the main source of livelihood of the people here but sadly, all is lost due to flooding, irrigation problems as well as neglection from the younger generation and incapability of the older generation to continue such work task at their age.

Traditional and modern house on the same piece of land

This kampung has been around for about a hundred years or so, and development will somehow gulf parts of the traditional site, much to our disappointment. Of Indonesian origins, the kampung is of around 3 to 4 thousand on the population count, now mainly consisting of the Malays and indigenous people living in tamans and kampungs where taman is the local term for the centralized and commercialize development of a housing area while kampung is generally recognized as the traditional housing area where people build their own houses on their respective lands, individually, without planning as a whole.

Simple, easy to find material for traditional house construction

That mentioned, the old, traditional houses were mostly built of sawmill wood which presumably came at a lower cost than that of hardwoods and was more readily available at the moment. Houses back then were build traditionally, by hand, no machines, mind you, with the help of the kampung people through an event the local call gotong-royong where people gather to give mutual aid to those in need or generally to contribute to the kampung and at the same time, mingle around with their neighbors. With gotong-royongs, houses can be built at a faster pace and within the time frame of a month, a fully habitable house is ready for a large family of 10 or so. Another thing about this kampung is, since it is majorly of the Islamic religion, they have a practice called zakat where the more capable, well off neighbors will give off part of their yearly monetary income to the zakat, more understandable as a kind of Islamic charitable fund, and the money will be redistributed to those in need, which in a way, helps sustain the less fortunate kampung people with their lives.

Besides gotong-royongs and zakats, there are festivals that has the capability to unite the people like Hari Raya Aidilfitri, one of the most prominent ones not only in Hulu Langat, but also in Malaysia. Hari Raya Aidilfitri marks the end of the fasting month, Ramadan, where Muslims around the country as well as other Islamic nation celebrate and share a common goal of unity. Another festival less known to people like us (its just another public holiday for us, yay!), is the Qurban or the feast of sacrifice where, according to En. Ghazali, is held at a public place with the people gathered and livestock animals, in this case, cows, sacrificed in honor of a prophet, according to this Wikipedia article here.

While a lot of the physical appearance of the kampung might have differ from what we originally thought it would be (like a bunch of traditional houses concentrated in a place but it was instead much more modernized and separated, by a huge main road, nevertheless), the non-tangible qualities of the kampung is somewhat still in existence and that is what makes a kampung a kampung.

Special thanks to En. Ghazali for talking us through kampung custom and habits