Carollers

It's been a while since the last post... This was meant to have been be posted after our last trip up to KL, during Christmas '05. But the photos were taken in my sister's camera and I've only managed to get them during this CNY trip up. So here they are, carollers from the church in Serdang Bahru (they have retained this name although the town is now called Seri Kembangan), who were invited to come to our house on Christmas eve by my parents. My parents had invited quite a lot of our relatives and friends for a buffet dinner they cooked for that evening. Unfortunately it rained heavily before the hour, so we didn't have everyone present. We were the first house the carollers came to. They had I think 5 more houses to go to after ours.

I was touched that the small village we grew up in, where everyone was a Hakka in the initial years, has managed to carved out a place for a Christian community of young and old folks. Many of these have now become close friends of the family and some make it a point to come by our house after church on Sundays to play chess with my father. (Our house is about 250m away from the church.) The church itself has just celebrated its 50th anniversary a few years back. It was started in 1952 as soon as the "new village" itself was formed. (A "new village" is essentially a barb-wired interned community to fenced in ALL chinese for being potential Communist sympathisers. China had fallen to the Communist just 3 years before that.)

According to the records from the church, the village had a population of 15,000 then. Today, who knows? Quite possibly 150,000 at least. The church has remained small, reaching to about 200 or 300 persons at most. Most of the early converts would have been seen as betrayers of their culture, western-loving weaklings. The first missionaries were a couple of women; one Ursula Kohler from Switzerland, and one Irene Neville from Australia. (Both were qualified nurses with the Red Cross.) When the present church building was constructed in 1964, villagers threw stones at the windows and vandalised the baptismal pool 3 times. But the church is totally indigenous now. Everything is conducted in either Mandarin or Hakka. The only thing western, if one seeks to look at the world as east and west, are consigned to the history books, from where I dug the names of the nurses up from. (And if you believe in Judgement Day, like I do, you may also believe that the names of these 2 nurses will be remembered then.)

Amongst this small enclave then, I'm always heartened whenever I see them utilising what little gift they have for their faith; a violinist, a pianist, music teachers, etc. The last Sunday, the preacher used powerpoint from his notebook for the sermon. They are a small community but they make do. They have been quietly raising funds for a new meeting hall for several years now. They are optimistic about the future.

Chup