O Candidate for Light…Hast Thou Attuned Thyself to Humanity’s Great Pain?

What topics will AI offer to answer this question?  Last week for the blog, seven topics arose from DAM (divine automatic machine) with the seventh,  Reflecting on Insights from Percival Everett. Whose insights, I ask?  Not mine. And whose voice offers the insights?

The quote above… ended a power-point presentation last Friday in Mathews, when I spoke to the Chesapeake Bay branch of the National League of American Pen Woman about an experience from June 1988. Happenchance had led me to be with a U.S. Army Medical team in a cordoned area of Perak, a state in peninsular Malaysia. Nine days among the Semai, one of seventeen Orang Asli groups in Malaysia, all of which have different dialects. The OA are the original inhabitants of this part of the world: not the Malays, not the Chinese, not the Tamil East Indians.

The whole experience was good for me, good for my soul. In being with the Semai, I saw the effects of malaria and a diet of tapioca and corn. This could not be romanticized. But I also saw the Semai, beneath the spiritual umbrella of a fortified group soul.  

I saw men who cared for the children while women tended the fields, and women who were with the children while the men hunted wild boar or fished in rivers.  

I will not forget one child in a Semai village near a stream. The team of five in the four-month malarial study were in the batin (headman’s) house, one nestled among jungle, with rain falling outside. One small boy wore a donated shirt, one with a logo: “We Are Not Alone.”

The Semai welcomed medical help but wished to live as they always had: foraging and planting crops, teaching their children to live in harmony with the jungle. Yet made to convert to a religion that defies animism and dream journeys and lessens women? Would this be their destruction? What would modern, urbanized, industrialized, and computerized society offer them? But before my talk last Friday, I was gratified to find a February 2024, article: Squatters in Their Own Land, about the Semai, now in the state of Pahang.

Next week: How this experience led me to Eric Blair (George Orwell) in Burma