Thursday, August 03, 2017

Pulau Jerejak - 1

When I woke up this morning it was from a dream that pleasing both spiritually as well as in the physical sense; cannot remeber what it was all about but I felt the outcome and was elated. I did my sitting  which followed with my prayers and then my Yoga stretching exsercises which flowed out naturally from within- hardly any resistence. The daylight ouside my living room window displayed an overcast sky with cool wind blowing through the house and i tried to wake up my daughter as her alrm war ringing but to no avail as she crwled deeper into her blanket.
Making myself a cup of coffee I turned to the computer and picked out a soft music to listen to while i make my entry for the day which i really have no idea what or how it will turn out to be. The tune I a listening to happens to be, "In the Mood for Love," by Shigeru Umebayashi; never heard of before but the violin sounds awesome and i am waltzing in my head, not bad for starters this morning. Outside the wind had died down and the skies are befogging to clear- no rain, false flag. As i gazed out towards the horizon I realized that I could see the sea and the island of Jerejak where i used to work for three years as the ferry terminal supervisor serving the Jerejak Resort and Spa facility on the island. The resort is still up and running but i have no idea who owns it now or how it is faring business-wise today. 
My two odd years working for the resort was as eventful as most of my past jobs had been and when I left i swore never to work for anyone anymore. One of the characters that got to me was the resort manager who had the ego of the son of the former chief of police in Penang and had spent a part of his life being educated in Chicago, in the US. he was a drunk pretty much most of the time i was working under him and handled the place like he owned it. He was aggressive and obnoxious towards most of the resort staff including myself and the staff being Malay Muslims, his drinking and swearing habit did not went too well with them and so one can see back then how the place beautiful as it was almost went under. But when you are the son of the former Chief of Police and you got strong connections, you cannot do wrong even if your actions brought negative effects on the business. This i found to be the general fate of most Malay owned businesses; accountability is cast to the winds and ego rules the day. 
Jerejak Island or better known in Malay as Pulau Jerejak was at one time a penal colony, a  transit location for Indian and Chinese migrants who aarived from their respective contries brought over by the British East India Company to work in the Rubber Plantaitons and Tin mines primarily. here they were processed and reocated to various parts of the then Malay Peninsular. It was also an intern camp for Japanese prisoners during World War 2 and many heads were lost to the samurai blades during the occupation. Later it became a part of the leprosy colony where the old buildings still stands today as reminders of the times. It was a prison camp where politican dissidents and drug addicts were held for a time and most famously as known among the locals it was where Jins and various other evil spirits even bad luck were discarded or banished to by the Shamans, the dukuns and the bomohs. Hence Pulau Jerejak had a nasty history as an island.  



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