Tribal Longhouse

One of the tattooed elders.

Social time.

Sorting pepper. 

Our dinner is prepared.

 Souvenirs they hope we will buy.

 Including traditional hats (check the dancers further down).

 And weaving.

 The have generators to power TV's and have satellites, so they do know about the outside.

 Selvam talking to the chief.

 The traditional dancers.

 The families dividing up what we brought.

Our sleeping quarters, including the 'headhunter' string that poses a threat to night emissions.

Refuse dump.

Thursday, June 21^st continued.

Most of these pictures compliment the post that I typed yesterday.

The men and women of the Iban tribe have been practising tattoo art for a long time. One person in the tribe generally does it for the rest. The women use is for decoration and a man uses it to show important events in his life and to show where he has been.

During my travels this year I have encountered cultures that are being transformed by television, mobiles, social media, and the internet. The younger generation is much more aware of the outside world and have more opportunities than the previous generations. As a result, many of the younger generation don’t want to live the life their parents did and leave the community and the culture. The Iban tribe has the same challenges, but as I mentioned previously most of the men who leave to make their mark in the country and provide for their longhouse, do return. They seem to like the community atmosphere and lifestyle.

On my walk around the outside of the longhouse village I found a fairly large garbage dump full of plastic on the side of the river. This was the one obvious sign of pollution in the area, but I am sure that all the other longhouses have the same dump, because according to the guides the government has not given the local people a communal dump to put the rubbish or a means of collecting it. Louis and Selvam clearly blamed the government for the problem not the local people.

Having heard that, I thought of the ‘gifts’ of food and necessities that we brought with us. Almost all of it was small packages of plastic multiplied by 37 to include all the families. That is another huge problem with packaging and recycling. Tourists and their companies bring all of this garbage with them and all the plastic water bottles, and leave it here where the locals have no way of disposing it and don’t have the education to worry about it. Something clearly needs to be done about this.