Back to Borneo
Write a day in your life when you’re 30 years old.
“The sounds of the birds in the trees wake me early. I roll out of my hammock and rest my feet on the sand, looking out through the gaps in the walls of my grass hut to see if the goats are nearby. Stepping outside I find my sandals by the door and look out over the Malaysian beach to watch the sunlight glinting off the calm morning ocean. I walk around my hut to the forest behind and pick a few bananas and a papaya for breakfast. My goat leaves the others on the beach and I coax her over with some curly fern tendrils. While she’s munching her breakfast I manage to get her to stay still to be milked for a few minutes. Fruit salad and fresh milk for me this morning.
After breakfast I get my bike from behind my hut and carry it across the sand to the dirt path that leads to the road. It’s an easy ten minute ride into town where I help out at the school for the morning. At lunchtime one of the teachers invites me home and I share lunch with them before heading back out to the beach. After sleeping through the worst of the afternoon heat I go surfing until almost sunset.”
When I was a student at East Junior High, in Boise, Idaho, my English teacher assigned the class to write a story in present tense about our life at the age of 30. The actual story I wrote has been lost in the progress from word processors to real computers and floppy disks to flash drives. I wrote this little story from memory, from what I think was the main points of my English assignment. I don’t remember what grade I got on it, or even which year in junior high I wrote it. What stuck with me, obviously, was the idea.
I don’t live in Malaysia. I don’t have a grass hut on the beach. I don’t have a pet goat and I still have never been surfing. However, I just visited Malaysia for the first time in my life and I would like to thank my English teacher for that vacation. Perhaps I would have traveled to Malaysia some day anyway, but the impetus for this trip really was remembering the story I had to write in school.
Growing up in Boise, Idaho, I didn’t really think I would ever get to Malaysia. I just didn’t want to write the “I’ll have a good job and lots of money and two cars and a big house and two kids and a cat and a dog” story that would have been the easy way through the assignment. Even if I didn’t believe I would go to Malaysia, I wanted to do something different. My teachers always supported that.
I want to thank all the teachers at East Junior High for supporting me and encouraging me to dream big. Unfortunately, I think students remember when teachers tell them they can’t do something, even if they don’t remember every word of encouragement they get along the way. I might not remember what grade I was in when I wrote that story, but I do remember that nobody laughed at it. Nobody told me that my story was ridiculous and that there was no way I was going to live in a grass hut on a beach in Malaysia with a pet goat and a bike.
I had a lot of supportive teachers all through school, and their encouragement has made a huge difference in my life. I now live in Bangladesh and just got back from a week’s vacation in Malaysian Borneo. I turn 31 in two weeks, so this vacation was my last chance to go to Malaysia while I’m still 30. I still plan to learn to surf, but I’m not putting a time limit on that. There are no beaches for surfing near where I live, and it might be a while before I get around to that part of the dream. I have now seen enough of goats that I don’t want to ever have one for a pet, although living on a beach wouldn’t be bad!
I still have a lot to learn, but the lesson I’m taking away from this experience is that dreams do come true.
