Early History of Peace Corps in North Borneo (Sabah)1 by

Thaine H. Allison, JrVP Programs Friends of Malaysia, El Chan Language Coordinator,

and AJ Grantham RPCV North Borneo/Sarawak I 1962-64

This short essay is an attempt to record some of the early history of Peace Corps in the former

British Crown Colony, North Borneo, now Sabah, Malaysia. It is, for the most part, an informal

history, based on the personal memories of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) and staff at the

time. The general perspective is that of the volunteers and looks at some of the global issues of training

and selection. It examines the Peace Corps challenges in its early days and the host country perspective

of accepting help from this new program. We also tie in the historic evolution of Peace Corps in the

broader Malaysia and the continued interaction of these volunteers with current day Malaysia.

Peace Corps can trace its roots to late stages of the Marshall Plan and US Technical Cooperation

Administration, under the Eisenhower Administration, and various non-profit programs implemented

after WWII. Hubert Humphrey is most often cited as the person who coined the phrase Peace Corps.

The American Friends Service (AFS) pioneered voluntary public service during times of war and

beyond and provided a basis for how to administer a voluntary government program. Starting in the

1950s the International Voluntary Service (IVS), a non-profit volunteer organization, was active in

Africa, South America and South East Asia and served as a model to structure the Peace Corps. When

Sargent Shriver was asked to establish the Peace Corps, under his brother-in-law John F. Kennedy, he

turned to former volunteers and staff from these and other organizations for advice.

Chronicling the early history of the Peace Corps is complicated by the fact that most of the early

governmental records were lost in a warehouse fire in 1970. Many of the principals who imagined a

Peace Corps and implemented the beginning projects have passed away. Our efforts here are to

contribute to this historical record by pulling together unofficial recollections and personal documents

from our Peace Corps experiences.

In its early days Peace Corps projects were a two-way street in that Sargent Shriver and his

small staff sought out countries that might host volunteers. Foreign governments heard about the

possibilities of getting American staff and sought to bring volunteers to their country. Add to this the

problem of training, equipping and supervising volunteers in a rapidly changing world and the tasks at

hand might have seemed impossible. It is clear that there was an effort to get volunteers into Africa

_______________________

1. This is not an official document of the Friends of Malaysia. Several Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs) contributed to this brief history but I take sole responsibility for any errors or omissions. My research is based on conversations with RPCVs from North Borneo/Sarawak I and other sources public and private. My primary goal was a short history during the brief time that Peace Corps Volunteers severed in North Borneo, before the creation of Sabah and Malaysia in 1963.

first, South America second. This has led to the long standing rivalry between volunteers who arrived

in Ghana first, while the volunteers for Colombia started training first. The Colombia Volunteers were

held back so that the first volunteers on the ground were in Africa I (August 28, 1961). Countries in Asia

and South East Asia lagged behind but had volunteers in the first year of Peace Corps. Most would

agree there was a global strategy to have volunteers throughout much of the developing world as fast as

possible.

The United States had no representation in North Borneo or Sarawak In 1961. Any issues

between the governments were handled through the American Embassy in Singapore. American

soldiers and pilots had experienced encounters with the Japanese during WW II on the island and in the

skies above North Borneo but beyond a few early anthropologists very little was known about this

British colony by American authorities. We might ask then, how did this small corner of the world

come to host one of the first contingents of Peace Corps volunteers?

In the late Fall of 1960 Mrs. Vera Chok, a native of Borneo, returned to Jesselton(now Kota

Kinabalu) from advanced teacher training programs at San Diego State University and the University

of Missouri. She had been instrumental and a driving force in re-establishing schools in North Borneo

following WWII. By early 1961 she was the Deputy Director of Education responsible for the teaching

of English in all North Borneo schools and for training teachers to teach English as a second language.2

During her years in the United States she had witnessed the election of John Kennedy and read

about the founding of the U. S. Peace Corps. She was very much aware that many of the early PC

Volunteers were teachers. She shared this information with her colleagues in Jesselton and with the

British Colonial head of the Department of Education. She became the local advocate for securing

Peace Corps Volunteers for North Borneo. Mrs Chok never missed an opportunity to tell other

department directors about the program and how American volunteers might assist in their respective

efforts. British authorities had negotiated an agreement to end colonial rule and grant independence to

mainland Malaya and were looking for options for their Borneo territories and Singapore. Retiring

Colonial Service Officers were exiting their posts as the potential for independence drew near. The

British Colonial Officers foresaw a shortage of college trained manpower for these colonies as their

involvement wound down.2

Mrs Chok tenaciously nudged the then British Colonial government to consider seeking

American Peace Corps Volunteers for many different fields of expertise. The British Colonial

authorities initially were very apprehensive, skeptical and reluctant. Many in the British community

__________________ 2 This section was contributed by returning Peace Corps volunteer, A..J. Grantham, a son-in-law of the late Mrs. Chok

adamantly opposed the importation of American “kids” to ‘their’ colony. In addition to Mrs Chok

many locals in various departments also began to press for Peace Corps Volunteers. Notable local

advocates included: Lawrence Lieu, Deputy Director of the Department of Agriculture and Jeffery

Belton head of training at the Tuaran Agricultural Training Institute.

As independence approached the Education Department staff saw the end of the British funded

Nuffield Program Specialists who supervised teachers of English. The staff saw the potential to have

native speaking English teachers who would not only teach children at all levels but also teach the local

teachers. Resistance continued but over time weakened. There was some serious consternation over

the issue of British English versus American English, which continues today. Eventually the greater

interests of the colony and its people were recognized and there was consensus that adding trained

teachers to the small local teacher corps, at a time when demand for education was soaring, was the

important issue.

By early Spring of 1962 Mrs Chok had requests from the Department of Public Works for

surveyors and hydrologists; the Department of Agriculture for extension agents and 4H organizers; the

Department of Health, for nurses and laboratory technicians; the Department of Education for English,

science and math teachers; and the Department of Labor, for an economist with a background in

statistics. As additional departments learned of the Peace Corps and began to ask for volunteers, the

North Borneo Government, with the written approval of the Foreign Office in London, finally

responded to these requests of the local administrators and requested a small initial group of volunteers.

The North Borneo request was coupled with one from the British Crown Colony of Sarawak as

well. The first group of volunteers arrived in late August 1962. In passing, it should be noted that in

2002 the Sabah Government conferred on the 82 year old Mrs. Chok the title Tokoh Guru Negri Sabah,

a lifetime achievement award honoring her outstanding services as a teacher in the State.

Some PCVs who were assigned to teach English in Sabah schools--especially in those schools

where transition from Chinese to English was the goal--used the textbooks authored by Robert Lado

and Charles Fries of the University of Michigan's English Language Institute (E.L.I.). An E.L.I.

specialist in intensive language instruction, William H. Buell, arrived in the Sabah Education

Department from Ann Arbor in 1962 of 1963, where he provided language instruction oversight to

those PCVs who were teaching from the Lado and Fries textbooks.

In the mean time,the Peace Corps was still operating on an Executive Order from President

Kennedy and an unconfirmed Director, Sargent Shriver, who was personally financing the organization

on his American Express account and working for one dollar a year. There was no budget or formal

bureaucracy to recruit and staff projects. Sally Bowles, a long time State Department staffer and

daughter of Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles , was on loan and she recruited the daughter of a

famous judge and law school professor(Hardy Cross Dillard ) Joan Dillard to help organize things.

Joan Dillard served as a PCV in Sabah Group I and, later, as a longtime staff member with the Peace

Corps in Washington where she was an acknowledged expert in the trainee selection process.

As government is prone to do, a contract, probably sole source, was let to a non-profit group

Agricultural Technical Assistance Foundation (ATAF) to recruit, and manage the agricultural

volunteers. (No current information about this organization is available.)

A second contract was let to the University of Hawaii, which housed the East West Center and

its capable staff and graduate students to develop a training program for approximately 100 volunteers.

They were to arrive on campus June 15, 1962 for ten weeks of training in language, cultural, American

politics, history of Southeast Asia, and the technical skills required of volunteers. In addition trainees

were to be physically fit, including introduction to local games of soccer and badminton, and able to

swim a mile and be certified drown proof. The University had to house the trainees, provide food and

logistics and identify healthcare providers to deal with dental and physical health. The University

decided to house the training program in Hilo on the big island of Hawaii at its small two year campus.

In the interim applications had to be garnered from college campuses and other sources,

reviewed, potential applicants tested, an eight hour massive battery of tests. Physicals had to be

scheduled at U.S. Air Force bases where a flight surgeon was stationed and a background check had to

be conducted by the FBI for each applicant. Once applicants were invited to training, and they

accepted, travel arrangements were made for 102 volunteer trainees. They congregated at San

Francisco International Airport early June 15, 1962 from all over the country. The first problem for

Sally Bowles, and her charge of eager volunteer trainees, was Pan Am assumed that they were traveling

stand-by like other “military personnel” since they had orders from a “Sargent” Shriver. About half of

the contingency went on the morning flight to Honolulu. The remainder were entertained by the airline

with a bus tour of the city and lunch at Fisherman's Wharf. The last trainee arrived in a pouring rain in

Hilo late in the evening, tired and hungry and ready to start training and the grand adventure. This was

the largest group of Haoles(white people in the local language) to “invade” Hilo since WWII and the

group was viewed with skepticism. Who were these kids and why would they volunteer to go half way

around the world? As the summer wore on the community graciously welcomed these volunteers.

The single male trainees were offered cots in the gym, the females went to the small dormitory

on campus. That left five married couples to share a four bedroom house close to campus. Straws

were drawn and one couple became house parents for the dorm, the rest drew straws for the bedrooms.

One of the rooms was the nursery with only a crib, of course the tallest and largest couple by the luck

of the draw won that room, my wife and me. Meals were provide by the vocational school which

offered a training program in culinary arts for local restaurants. Trainees settled in for the training

which began at 7:00 AM the next day.

There are three aspects of training seldom described. The first was the hunt to create a language

program. There were numerous discussions about which language to teach. Malay was a language that

had never been taught in America before. A similar language, Indonesian, had been taught at Cornell

University. No suitable books were available, and few native speakers lived in the US as far as anyone

could determine. The second issue was the physical and emotional evaluations that we were all

subjected to. This included numerous vaccinations and questions about our mental and physical health.

The third was the selection/deselection process. America had never sent civilians abroad in large

numbers before. The president had promised that these volunteers would speak the local language. It

was easy for Ghana, it was an English speaking country and Colombia, lots of American's had been

taught and had learned Spanish. But exotic South East Asia Languages were seldom taught so it was

up to the University of Hawaii to create something.

One advantage that the University of Hawaii had was five graduate students from North Borneo

, Sarawak and Singapore studying on campus. Three were Chinese and two were Baba-Nonya(see note

below) and all had experience with bazaar Malay but no formal training in the language. Using other

language text books and a mimeograph machine, language training materials were created and turned

out nightly. There were usually 18 to 20 sentences for distribution and memorization the next day.

Most of the instructors were learning the language at night and teaching it during the day. By the end

of the second week trainees had to make up a sentence to get in to the cafeteria for meals and at the end

of the third week they were required to speak Malay at meals. In the beginning there were some very

quiet meals. Bazaar Malay3 was selected as the appropriate language to train the volunteers to speak.

Bazaar Malay was widely spoken all over Sarawak, North Borneo (now Sabah) and Brunei, and

in Singapore and Malaya. It originally developed naturally from the frequent inter-marriages between

the Malays and Chinese in the region. This was before self government which then influenced inter-

racial marriage negatively following the independence of the States in the region. The inter-marriage

was widely spread among the peoples of Singapore, Malaya, Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei and

some parts of Western Indonesia on the Island of Borneo. It formed an inter-racial group known as the

Baba and Nyona. This racial group formed the basic "race" of people who were mostly English-

educated and who provided the manpower for the British colonial governments that then ruled

Singapore, Malaya, Sarawak, North Borneo and Brunei at the time.

____________________

3. This section was contributed by El Chan who was the language coordinator for the North Borneo/Sarawak I, and other training groups.

Bazaar Malay was wisely chosen for the Project because it was the most practical language

spoken in the region where volunteers were to be assigned. Because it was widely spoken,

volunteers and the local citizens would feel more at ease and

volunteers would be more welcome by the locals. It was the

most appropriate, practical and socially acceptable language.

At the time the project was prepared for the region, there was

no Bazaar Malay language book available for training Peace Corps

volunteers. There were more formal Malay language books but there

was no language more widely used than the Bazaar Malay. El Chan

was studying at the University of Hawaii at the time as an East-West

Center Grantee. He was the only student from the North

Borneo/Sarawak Also he was the only student to come from the Baba-

Nonya race and Bazaar Malaywas his first language. Also he was Malay Language teachers Lucas

a product of the Batu Lintang Teachers Training College in Kuching, Chin, left and El Chan, right

Sarawak. So it was appropriate for the the training project to select him to help prepare the lessons as a

choice of language training for the volunteer trainees. Under the guidance of Dr. Floyd M. Cammack ,

a linguist who was head of the library at the University of Hawaii Manoa Campus in Honolulu, Hawaii

he generated the training materials.

Dr Cammack provided a practical conversational book for studying English as a second

language that El Chan then translated the lessons into Bazaar Malay. These translations were done

every weekend at the University of Hawaii recording studios and prepared where he created a set of

lessons for the following week with recorded copies for each of the other language instructors from

Sarawak, Singapore, and Malaya. The other instructors(three students from Malaya and one from

Singapore who were Bazaar Malay speakers, and two graduate students in linguistics) in turn

conducted language lessons from the tapes he recorded during the weekend. The method was

developed by Dr Cammack and was based on the language training of foreign languages for US

diplomats before they took up their assignments in foreign countries. The foreign language school for

diplomats located at Naval Post Graduate School at Monterey, California served as the model.

The lessons were common conversational phrases to be repeated over and over again until the

students were able to pick them up and say them in a natural way and at natural speed rather than

repeated each word of each phrase slowly. The trainees then connect the meaning of the words and

phrases and would then speak the language in a natural way and at natural speed. It was as simple as

that. This is the pattern of language teaching today widely used commercially and successfully in the

teaching of foreign languages.

The Bazaar Malay as trained during the early groups was the most common Baba-Nyona

Bazaar Malay as spoken by the Volunteers. It helped them to succeed in communicating more

effectively with the local communities in the Region. Some volunteers who were assigned to Borneo

later fed back information to the training staff how they were welcomed warmly when they spoke the

"Bazaar Malay" as taught by the University of Hawaii training faculty.

John Langraf, first in country director, later wrote “that a PCV in Tenom was teaching English

in a Chinese school. under a British supervision...The usual medium of instruction in the school is

Mandarin Chinese, but all of the students have grown up as native Hakka speakers...Because the PCV

was given audio-lingual training in colloquial Malaya...he uses this speech for much of his informal

communication with his students and with Hakka shopkeepers in Tenom. If the volunteer goes further

afield in Tenom, however, he soon finds that most of the indigenous people around Tenom speak

rudimentary Malay, and are really at ease only in the Temongun dialect of Murut. which has not yet

been described by linguists...Each of the communities of North Borneo and Sarawak, where the writer

worked as Peace Corps staff, offers different speech problems and the local variations are often as great

in other PC countries...” 4

At later stages of Volunteer Language Training after independence in 1963, the language used

was unfortunately changed to a formal Malay language that was "re-invented" by the Department of

Education at the direction of the Federal Government of Malaysia. The language was "re-invented" so

that even the Malays had to re-learn their own language. In an effort to formalize a form of national

language, the Malayan government in Kuala Lumpur, Malayasia, "re-invented" a formal Malay

language with new words that were never used before. It was not widely spoken in the region.

The Volunteer Project at Hilo Campus of the University of Hawaii had to comply with the wishes of the

Federal Malaysian Government and adopted the new formalized "re-invented" Malay language for the training

of Volunteers to ensure that the University would retain the contract for training Volunteers to the region.

At this point in time, seeing the impractical usage of the "re-invented" Malay language, Mr Chan removed him-

self from assisting the Volunteer Program and continued his education to pursue a degree in journalism at

Syracuse University in New York where he earned his undergraduate degree.

The second aspect of training was the stress. It involved the psychological tests and multiple

evaluations by the psychiatric team. One approach used was a test that the Space Agency (precursor to

NASA) used to select astronauts: What three volunteers would you most like to be stationed with?

What three volunteers would you least like to be stationed with? There were various combinations of

________________ 4. J. Landgraf, Aspects of anthropology and language study in the Peace Corps. Modern Language Journal 47: 305-310, 1963

these types of questions in sessions with the psychologist and other oral and written psychological tests.

Often the trainees would try and game the system. Who was struggling with the language or the

swimming programs? How can I help them out? Who could we get rid of because they wanted to

deliver Bibles to the natives or some other reason?

At the same time trainees were getting a battery of shots for a variety of dreaded diseases. The

pain and side effects were distracting and sometimes hard to deal with. There were the regular visits to

the psychologist to review statements we had made, attitudes we had expressed or answers to the test

questions. Any tooth that showed any kind of potential problem was drilled and filled or extracted.

Those with eye glasses were fitted with a reserve pair. Training was emotionally and physically

exhausting. Long days, study sessions, stress and fear of failure, physical activities all contributed to

the uncertainties of training.

The third aspect of training was the deselection process. Almost every night someone would be

tapped in their sleep, their belongings quietly gathered and they would be gone in the morning. No

good byes, no explanation, just gone. This made it emotionally risky to share confidences and establish

friendships. Your new best friend might be gone in the morning and you were left to sort it out without

a good bye. Many would worry that if they shared a secret with someone that they might be pulled

aside for conferences or questions from the staff psychologists. If your friend disclosed something told

in confidence that could lead to deselection, of being tapped in the night. In the end, 62 of us got on

the plane for the fabled Land Below the Wind.

Meanwhile in North Borneo there was an effort to build about a dozen class three standard

government houses to provide housing for the volunteers coming in September and landing at their

assigned site in mid October. Peace Corps agreed to

pay for the construction of these houses which were

“standard issue” to teachers and other low level civil

servants. They were usually built in a compound with

other government workers and had two bedrooms,

living room, kitchen and pantry, a shower room and a

water closet or outhouse if no sewer was available.

These houses were clean, safe and comfortable. They

were built using corrugated asbestos roofing and flat Standard House Built by North Borneo

asbestos panels for siding. Government, Bandau for Peace Corps

Volunteers and Other Government Officials

Staffing of the Peace Corps office was also a problem. A director(John Langraf), finance

person(John J. “Skip” Conway who later became the deputy director in Sabah), secretary, and a

physician(Dr Richard Tompkins) were the basics. The first in-country director was John Landgraf a

professor of anthropology at NYU. Dr Landgraf had studied the Murit people and maintained contacts

in the Kadazan community in Penampang in the early 1950's. He knew the territory, native people and

some government officials. Peace Corps hired him because he knew the culture and had a sense of

place, but he was not an administrator, in the traditional US government structure. He had a successful

career in academic administration at NYU following his departure from Jesselton in January 1963.

Others were added as more volunteers arrived(most notably Dr Charles Parton who served as

associate director under Skip Conway). Other early staffers included: David Griffith, MD, who became

the Peace Corps Physician in Jesselton. Roger Flather was the third Peace Corps director in Sabah.

John Hurley was his associate director, and Gus Breyman followed Hurley to Jesselton in 1966. Gus

Breyman provided a picture of the Peace Corps office, a 1966 (pre-Kota Kinabalu) view of Jesselton

from Signal Hill. The Peace Corps office was located on the 3rd floor of what was then the Chung

Khiaw Bank Building, upper right center of this image.

John Landgraf and North Borneo Students 1962 Peace Corps Office 1962

A power struggle developed between Dr landgraf and a long time state department employee,

Joe Fox the deputy director with broad State Department administrative experience who was assigned

to the Kuching, Sarawak office. The bureaucrat won the battle and we lost our leader that had been

through training with us from the beginning. Landgraf and the Kuching secretary were put on planes

and bundled out of Sabah in a weirdly hush-hush operation, Joe Fox.

This left the volunteers with mixed feelings, on the one hand Dr. Landgraf knew the people, the

volunteers and the country but wasn't a great administrator versus Joe Fox who knew the rules and

wanted more structure and accountability but did not know the volunteers as people or the problems we

faced on the ground. Mostly we were left alone by Peace Corps, we made our own way and excelled at

the things we could and coped with the short comings of Peace Corps politics.

This occurred shortly after our first Christmas in North Borneo, 1962. In early December the

Bruni rebellion took place in Northern Sarawak, Lembang and a married couple stationed in Sebetang

were caught in the cross fire with their British District Officer. No one was hurt, and unlike the

volunteer in Labang they were able to escape the rebels. Mimi(English teacher) and Tom

Kajer(Agricultural Officer) were sent to Washington for debriefing and eventually reassigned to Belize.

The Bruni Revolt is documented in a film, Return to Limbang and is part of the Sarawak history of

Peace Corps, Fritz Klatenhoff was captured by the rebels. After he was rescued he eventually wound

up in Hawaii as a Peace Corps trainer. It is not clear how much these events contributed to Dr

Langraf's departure but they all happened in the same time period.

Once local training was completed and volunteers were sent to their sites supervision was pretty

much left to the local government counterparts. Many of the English teachers were supervised by

Canadian Colombo Plan advisers attached to the Sabah Department of Education. These included:

Martin Williamson; Martin Collacott; and Bill Tremaine.

Volunteers were placed throughout the colony of North Borneo. The most isolated was a nurse,

Gay Kinard, who was four days up the Kinabatangan River at an outpost. Shortly after she arrived a

young man was brought to her who had been gored by an elephant. She brought him down river to the

hospital in Sandaken. Several volunteers were placed in and around Jesselton, a couple of volunteer

teachers at Beaufort, a married couple at Sebetang, who were caught up in the Bruni uprising in

December 1962. Several teachers were stationed in Ranau and Keningau. There were also agricultural

and teacher volunteers in and around Kota Belud. My wife, a teacher, (at the time, we celebrated our

first anniversary in Honolulu after training) and I (Assistant Agricultural Officer) were stationed in

Bandau, now called Kota Marudu. Others went to Tauwau and Sandaken.

In December 1962 an additional group of about 30 volunteers arrived including a veterinarian, a

home economist and several more health workers and teachers. There was a radio technician to assist

Radio Sabah with programing and engineering challenges. The third group (teachers) arrived in

December, 1963. A fourth group arrived in April 1964 to take the place of group I. Volunteers arrived

about every six months through 1979 or 1980. The last volunteer left in the fall of 1982, shortly after

my first return visit. While there is no detailed record of who and how many volunteers served in those

twenty years, Friends of Malaysia has estimated approximately 600 to 700 Volunteers passed through

Sabah. Of course after September of 1963 North Borneo gained independence and became a state of

Malaysia. The Peace Corps program was then administered from Kuala Lumpur although still quite

independent.

The focus of this effort is on the issues most directly associated with starting the Peace Corps

assignments in North Borneo(Sabah) and not the broader geo-political issues that were going on in

South East Asia during this time, including the build up of the war in Vietnam and Indo-China. It was a

significant era in which PCVs entered North Borneo and Sarawak events included: the Cobbold

Commission investigations; the transition to Malaysia; Singapore's ejection from Malaysia;

Konfrontasi with Indonesia; and the Philippines claim to Sabah. All of these events transpired while

volunteers went about their daily activities and are documented elsewhere.

Peace Corps celebrated the twenty fifth anniversary of its founding in Washington DC in 1986.

There were no volunteers serving in Malaysia at that time but a small group of us met under a scraggly

tree to try and find some relief from the sun and “created” Friends of Malaysia. Our objectives are to:

Promote a better understanding of Malaysia and its people among Americans; Foster improved

education in Malaysia; Support the Malaysian people in protecting their environment; and Support the

Peace Corps Agency in its work around the world.

We continue, twenty-seven years later, with a variety of ongoing service projects that we

support in Malaysia. Our general focus has been health care issues and education, particularly in rural

areas. We lost two of our members to breast cancer in 2002 and used this as an impetus to start a breast

cancer awareness project working with the University of Malaysia Medical School. We have ongoing

donations to this special fund and are looking for opportunities to provide additional training aids to

help women identify infections early and get treatment at an early stage. We try to use our funds in

situations that will not replace government funds but add to the resources in a community. Our goal is

to establish a long term relationship with these organizations and have a sense of connection between

our RPCVs and the current NGO projects we support.

Other projects include: contribution to the Borneo Project to supply native language books to

Penan schools in Sarawak (US$250 for printed posters of the “Frogs of Borneo” illustrations from their

books); US$250 contribution to the Rotary Club of Klang to improve a kidney dialysis center; work

with a 4th grade teacher in New Hampshire who has a new student from Malaysia to acquire books for

the student to read in Bahasa Malaysia as she integrates into an English medium environment; US$250

contribution to the Malaysia Run for the Cure Breast Cancer Prevention Fund; purchase of computers

for rural Sabah Schools, US$1,000; assist the Borneo Project to create hydroelectric power for rural

villages, US$3,000; assist in training health professionals by providing US$300 scholarships; provide

training equipment for breast cancer awareness projects in Sabah and Sarawak, US$4,000; contribute

US$200 to the Malaysia Cancer Society; contribute US$500 to World Wide Schools; foster a reading

program for International Children’s Book Day featuring Malaysian children’s favorite stories. In total,

we have contributed nearly US$10,000 to projects that foster understanding and development between

America and Malaysia, our adopted country. In total we have contributed nearly US$10,000 to projects

that foster understanding and development between America and Malaysia, our adopted country.

Our web site http://friendsofmalaysia.org/ and our newsletter Apa Kabar (available on line at

http://issuu.com/friends-of-malaysia) are the primary means of keeping in touch with former volunteers

and students in Malaysia who live all over the world. As VP of Programs and webmaster of Friends of

Malaysia, nearly every month I receive a request from someone who is looking for a teacher that taught

them, or their parent, and wondering how to contact a former Peace Corps Volunteer. Sometimes I am

lucky, sometimes I'm not, but I make an effort to reunite a returned Peace Corps Volunteer with

someone in that far off place we came to love so many years ago. Friends of Malaysia has won the

Lorett Rupy award twice and also the National Peace Corps Association newsletter award.

_______________________ Thaine H. Allison, Jr. can be contacted at thaineallison@gmail.com or through his web site http://ThaineHAllisonJr.com or through

http://FriendsofMalaysia.org