How many colouring books have you seen that teach a child our own trees? Not oak, not maple — terap, engkabang, tapang. Sit with that. If the honest answer is “none, or almost none,” a Sarawakian child can colour a fairy-tale forest from somewhere else long before anyone hands them the truth of the one in their own backyard.
Z orders an affogato — espresso poured over gelato, the classy order — and talks about tree bark the way most people talk about their children. Fifteen minutes in, she is still explaining her job title: biosphere conservation, forest sustainability engineering, longer than most people’s actual job descriptions. I laugh. I used to carry a version of that mouthful myself. Different uniform, same terrain.
Back in 2010 I sat in a corporate affairs chair doing conservation’s other job — the one nobody photographs. Co-authoring a coffee-table book on orangutans. Redesigning eco-tourism packages nobody in headquarters had walked through. I lasted a few years. Long enough to learn one thing the hard way: passion and peers are not the same currency. Most people just want their own station, undisturbed. Play it safe. Go home.
That is the quiet tragedy under Z’s melting gelato, and mine, years apart. Even the brightest light dims if you are the only one carrying it.
The trackers who out-scienced the science
I once wrote, in a column called We Were Never Left Behind, about two Iban trackers who quietly dismantled a century of European forest taxonomy — not with instruments, but by “reading” the biosphere as their grandparents had, correctly distinguishing two species of terap tree that outside science had spent generations conflating. Nobody handed them a light. They already had it. The problem was never capability, but that nobody built a system to receive what they knew.
“Knowledge is a lost property of the mukmin,” Z tells me, quoting a saying that has travelled through Islamic tradition for centuries. “Whoever finds it…” She leaves the sentence unfinished. She doesn’t need to. The trackers found it. So did she. The question is who else already has and was never asked.
Z’s decade-long project, Gogadong, is an attempt to build that mechanism. The name combines “go green” with gadong, Sarawak’s own word for cassava. In her words: “Go gadong is a call for action for stewardship, to nurture nature, especially for Sarawakians. We are nature.” Not a slogan, but a fact she wants people to remember.
The mechanism is simple: take satellite data and the technical language of sustainability, then funnel it through contemporary art — music, design and craft — using the apparatus a child already trusts, rather than the one a bureaucrat does.
The glue: rattan and a fireproof fruit
Here is where real creative art and real conservation data fuse, and it is smaller than you’d expect. Rattan was never a school subject, yet one length carries science, economy, heritage, community and craft — a curriculum disguised as a plant. Through Gogadong, a child might learn to weave a house frame or reimagine rattan through design into something the market has not yet invented.
Or take pineapple: its skin is naturally flame-resistant, a fact that belongs in a science classroom but lives nowhere. Turn it into a song or mural and “sustainable living” stops being a slogan and becomes instinct. That is Gogadong’s bet.
From an ice-cream idea to something bigger
It is not a small ambition, and Z knows it.
Playing For Change did not begin as a movement. It began with one man, Mark Johnson, hearing a busker named Roger Ridley sing ‘Stand By Me’ in Santa Monica in 2005 and asking why a voice like that was singing for spare change. Still in the dark? Here’s the link: playingforchange.com. Take a peek.
The answer became the method: record one song with dozens of unconnected street musicians around the world, then stitch their performances into a single track. What began as a handful of “Songs Around the World” grew into a foundation that has since built music schools across a dozen countries. The creative campaign became the institution it pointed towards.
I asked Z what she wants Gogadong to become. She gave me a list, not a mission statement: “Community connects community. A local platform for any Gogadong activities. Awareness. Knowledge and technology transfer.” Then, almost as an afterthought that turned out to be the point: “Knowledge as a seed.”
That is Playing For Change’s architecture, arrived at independently, over melting gelato, by someone who has probably never used the phrase. A single creative thread, strong enough to carry a hundred scattered local voices until they sound like one movement rather than a hundred NGO reports nobody finishes reading. A seed does not announce itself as an initiative. It simply becomes a tree nobody remembers planting.
That reach is not really an education idea, or an arts idea. It is a values column wearing both uniforms — the same trick I once pulled in a different chair, back in 2010.
Sit in a PIBG meeting and you see the raw material everywhere: parents hoping the system ahead of their children will be better than the one behind them. My colleague Rajah put it plainly in his own column: teach values, not hatred, in school.
The line stays with me because it names the actual shortage. Sarawak does not lack intelligence. It lacks a mechanism for carrying intelligence together, so no single teacher, tracker or ten-year passion project has to hold the whole light alone.
Hablum minal-alam
Ask Z what she wants to change, beneath it all, and she talks about a relationship, not a policy.
Hablum Minallah, Hablum Minannas — our relationship with God and with one another — is old ground in Islamic thought. Z adds a third leg, rarely spoken aloud: Hablum minal-alam, our relationship with nature. Hubungan antara manusia dan alam.
Stewardship, in her telling, is not an environmental position but a relationship we have quietly neglected, like a distant relative receiving fewer calls each year until silence becomes the relationship. One conservation engineer, carrying a decade of unpaid conviction, cannot repair that alone. A system that receives her, multiplies her efforts and leaves the next Z a lighter burden — that is the only Gogadong that survives beyond year eleven.
Back at the ice-cream parlour, Z has stopped explaining her job title. She is sketching the rattan idea on a napkin, unprompted. There, in ballpoint on tissue paper, is the whole argument: two people who once carried the same light separately, now sketching where it might finally be shared.
This Week’s Practice
Find one piece of local knowledge you were taught to file away as “not examinable” — a fruit, a tree, a craft. This week, hand it to someone in a form that will actually be received. Not the PDF. The napkin. Raw and true- a gogadong spark?
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune.
