year in photos

i forgot to do a collage of photos i love in 2011.

i only have a handful since my hard disk containing ALL my photos was stolen *sniffff*.

here are some photos that i’ve uploaded to my flickr account

 

Rural Economy

last week, my family was bombarded with death news, one after another. the closest to us was my late aunt (the husband is my dad’s cousin).

it’s a sad story: the husband was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer last year. he had undergone a few surgeries to remove the tumor and he is in the process of undergoing chemotherapy.

the wife, on the other hand, had a stroke some time around CNY and left her incapacitated. she had to be fed through tubes because she lost her ability to swallow.

feeding through tubes increases the chances of getting infections and that was what happened. she couldn’t fight off the infections and passed away around Wednesday noon.

the husband and wife is a Felda settlers, one of the firsts in the country. after the tahlil, dad had a talk with another cousin of his, who is also a Felda settlers about the latest issue: Felda listings.

Felda is currently trying to get enlisted in KLCI and to make that happen, Felda has to take back a few land grants from these Felda settlers because Felda has no real assets.

i don’t know how many of you knows how Felda works.

in a gist: Felda gives you a piece of land for you to develop, be it rubber or palm trees and in the course of 20-30 years, you will need to pay Felda back for this piece of land and after fulfilling this agreement, that piece of land will be yours.

Fair enough, no?

the wrong things about this KLCI thing is that Felda will need these settlers to hand-over the land title to Felda again to boost their assets.

and the settlers are pissed off because of this (at least some that i know of). they work hard for this piece of land, and now they need to let go of it?

i had some issues bugging me about this whole Felda thing – sure, they help the rural people earning some money; they give people work. i won’t take that away from them.

yet, these people who is feeding the economy of Malaysia (we used to be one of the top 5 producers of palm oil and rubbers) still lives in small houses with not a proper drainage and water systems. what gives?

the upper echelon who has never tapped a rubber tree  in their live are driving big cars, live in bungalows in the cities. the real people who should have all these luxuries did not even get a proper drainage system. pray tell, how is that fair?

when you think about it, the distribution of wealth doesn’t seem right even if you don’t really study how Felda works, right?

then, comes the issue of economy for the rural folks. my paternal grandfather originated from Kuala Pilah. when i was a child, Kuala Pilah were surrounded by scores of paddy fields all around but all these lands are now left dried out. no signs of resurrecting them to their former glories.

i was told that there was no one to work on them. yeah, all the younger generations left the town for the big cities.

we will have problems when Thailand can no longer provide agricultural produce for us. we rely too much on our imports for food. why didn’t the state government come up with a plan for a better use of these lands? do something agricultural. the town need something to keep striving. how many firemen, policemen, civil servants would you need in a small town anyway? no wonder i see loads of abandoned houses at this place. most of the younger generations must have left the area for careers in the cities.

time and time again, development plans by the government only concentrated towards the cities, especially KL. don’t you feel suffocated already, KL-ites? i know i do.

my BIL fought with his ketua kampung over something like this. the chief keeps on talking about using the money for upgrading the drainage system and yet left the younger generations without work. funding are indeed available, but they lack ideas and proper planning. there are no guidance, and those who held power are only interested to make their pockets thicker. in the end, these kids will resort to drugs and other vices.

*sigh* all my posts lately has been on an angry note. i’ll be grumpier when i reach 30 y.o. -__________-”

 

a scam

side note: somebody is currently reading every entry in this blog… i noticed this last week when there’s suddenly a huge spike in my site stats. heh.

whomever you are…. *waves*

****

it started during our ride back from Ulu Dong, Raub. my BIL made his desire known to sell his Vitara for a better, larger 4WD. the one flaw (or perfection, depends on how you look at it) my father  has is that he works too quickly. sometimes too quickly that you have no time to really think about what to do.

Dad scoured the web and found an advertisement in mudah. i don’t know what happened in between, nor i was privy to the communication between dad and this fellow. i had some idea of this only when dad showed our lawyer the copies of the communications he had with this fellow.

it seems that this fellow is selling his car way below the market price (like 15k lower) and this car is currently with a forwarding company (based in Italy). an interested buyer will have to pay a deposit of RM 8k (i assumed for booking) and the car will be released to the buyer for inspections. if the buyer is satisfied with the conditions of the car, the balance will have to be paid within 2 weeks.

the fellow did forward a copy of the forwarding company’s profile (i assumed because i did not get the chance to really look at the details before all these started to unfold). dad had taken the bait and both of my parents were already at the Western Union to bank-in the deposit.

when i found out that mom was about to pay the deposit, i google-d around, looking for signs of fraudulent or scheming in this whole scenario.

Lo and behold, pages after pages, stories after stories i read telling the same MO; how these frauds schemed people out of their hard-earned cash!

my mouth suddenly felt dry, blood drained out of my face. i felt like vomiting. with trembling fingers, i texted my mom telling her to hold off paying the deposit first before we get to the bottom of this.

i was lucky. from the moment i heard about the decision to bank-in the deposit to the moment i realised that this could be a scam, it was roughly around half an hour before i finally trusted my gut feeling (and google, of course) and informed my parents. in that half an hour, mom could have paid the deposit and lost all the money!

but, Allah helped us from making a huge mistake, and made paying the deposit so much harder that it supposed to. i was told that my parents had filled in a wrong form so they would have to fill another form and queue again.

after all the hassle and my uneasy feelings, dad decided not to pay the deposit yet until he can check further.

so he did and later decided, yes, it was a con job.

be very careful when it comes to online purchase/transactions. double and triple checks the legitimacy of the sales and always, always trust your gut feelings.

 

strange

i was battling through traffic one day when it suddenly hit me hard: i missed my husband.

isn’t that just sad? you keep replaying the best moment you had; the tease, the fight, the talk, the annoyance but it’s been too long since i had a physical connection that i now feel… strange. like, everything is all in a distant memory.

when you can’t remember your husband’s touch, his smell, his voice… it’s like, how i am remembering my late brother. you remembered his face, but the memory has become fuzzy.

i’m just glad i made the decision to follow him because you know what, i don’t think i can take another month of this.

for those seafarers’ wives, Field Engineers, or whatever jobs that force a couple to live separately for extended periods, you have my utmost respect and i salute you! it’s only been 2 months and i think i’m going crazy… T____T

the text, the phone calls, the video calls cannot replace the physical relationship. i long to have someone i can crash to after a long day at work, or going food hunting, looking for that food you crave.

this is hard.

 

kuala gandah

my favourite shots

i’m thinking of letting go my D60 and 35 MM lens and buy superzoom camera or the increasingly popular PEN. i find that carrying the bulky D60 everywhere is a bit of a burden at times, especially when i come home empty-handed.

but, looking at the price of these PEN cameras and what it can and cannot do with that price tags, i have doubts that i can be fully satisfied with their abilities, especially after using a DSLR with a prime lens.