Netball in the kampong

The attire is somewhat different to that I am accustomed to, the backdrop is far more spectacular, the umpiring a little haphazard (the umpire is also playing) and it's often left to the players to 'fess up to their errors. The game is the same, though, and everyone has fun.

Here you can see the patch of sand that we filled in under the goalpost.

The kids play while their mums play.

Netball

On Wednesday afternoons, I play netball. I am trying to make it more often, as this is something that I really enjoy in my week, but it does unfortunately often clash with our English/ Bahasa Melayu lessons. I was invited to netball by Liza, and am grateful that the colonial English left the legacy of this great sport in Malaysia as well as Australia.

Our shared enjoyment transcends language and cultural barriers. We meet at a communal area in the kampong of Kuala Dipang and as we gather the children play around the court, mothers sit and share a durian while discussing the happenings of the day, and teenage girls cluster together by the motorcycles, chatting animatedly and eating fried banana. Few of the other players speak much English, and my command of Bahasa Melayu, seriously limited at the best of times, on more “senior” days becomes a basic command of grammar accompanied by a non-existent recall of vocabulary. 

Last week we had the most fun I can recall. I arrived first, having cycled the 15 minutes along the main road from home. The “court” is a once-marked-out area of grass in the middle of the kampong, next to a sealed and fenced court that appears to be reserved for the men to play soccer. The lines are all visible, at least in part, if one looks carefully, though the centre circle must be approximated by the player taking the centre pass. Patchy grass covers all but the most heavily-worn areas, which on other days would have been dusty and a bit slippery. When I arrived yesterday, however, the lower side of the court and one goal area were submerged as a result of the afternoon's downpour. The ladies started arriving and decided that a few hundred litres of water on the court should not stop us having fun, so proceeded to gather spades and buckets and move sand from the parking area to the puddle under the northern goal. We all pitched in, and soon the court was deemed suitable for play.

Liza and Mas speak some English, though not as confidently as Asma, who usually takes a lead in organising everybody and referees while she is playing. Asma usually talks to me in English a bit, though I love to sit back and listen to the conversation in Bahasa Melayu, grabbing what snippets I can understand, listening to the pronunciation, the different accents and the feel of the language. I enjoy just trying to fit in, not being a celebrity, enjoying the privilege of being allowed to just be there. Asma has tried hard to make me feel welcome, using her command of English to explain bits of the culture, the game, the social goings-on and the language, and has been a real blessing. Asma wasn't there on that day, and for some time, none of the English-speakers were there, so I just had to get by with BM. It is good to be thrown into talking in Bahasa Melayu, without the option of deferring to English and translators. I am particularly fond of Linda. Her gentle, caring face tells me that she want me to understand, and she speaks slowly, with little groups of words that I can decipher in bits. She speaks little English, but I understand her best, because she takes the time to patiently explain things and to wait for a response.

All the other players are Moslem, and wear clothes that cover themselves to varying degrees. The first few times I played, most had long sleeves and long trousers, though now most are wearing short-sleeved T-shirts with long sports trousers. Asma and I wear scarves over our hair, but all the other ladies, young and old, wear a tudung while playing. Wearing a tudung can introduce all sorts of challenges in an active game like netball, but generally they manage well. I don't even notice the headwear now, except when someone turns up to play in something particularly bejewelled or ornate. The modern Malaysian tudungs are mostly lycra or nylon in one piece, easy to wear, and, I assume, easy to launder, and the loose ends can be twisted and tucked into one's T-shirt if need be.

The teams are usually the younger girls and the older women. Most often, we oldies win by a good margin, but on the semi=submerged field the game was very close, possibly because the older ladies picked their way gingerly through the mud, protecting bodies and the families that rely on those bodies being whole and functional, while the young girls ran around with the abandon that can be enjoyed by the young and naïve. In our bare feet we slipped in the mud, sloshed in the sodden sand and splashed through the submerged part of the field. Every pair of feet and legs became an itchy, mosquito-bitten muddy mess, and soggy trousers were rolled up over ankles and calves. We fell in the mud, in the water, and onto each other. We screamed and cursed without swearing. We dropped the ball and scrambled in a mad, muddy mangle of bodies to regain it. But most of all we laughed. We laughed at ourselves and we laughed at each other. We laughed at the craziness of playing netball with the court like this, and we laughed at the difficulties. We made silly noises and pretend-whistle-sounds, as Asma-with-the-whistle was not there to referee. As always, the play was mostly fair and good-natured, and we refereed ourselves. Miraculously, no-one was hurt, and just before seven, all the Moslem ladies hurried to be home in time for prayers, leaving me to wait for my husband to arrive with the D-Max to carry me and my bike home to a warm shower and clean clothes. I waited, bitten, muddy and smelly, but satisfied, having truly had fun. On the netball court, culture, religion and language disappear, and what truly matters is integrity and a pure spirit.

If that was an unusual netball session, Saturday's was even more interesting. Unusually, not enough people turned up to play, and after some phone calls, Za and Linda discovered that a number of the ladies were at a party. This was conveyed to me in Linda's simple, telegraphic communication, punctuated with many, “Faham? Understand?” We apparently thenceforth invited ourselves to the party, or should I say, the ladies invited themselves and I was commanded to join them. Their motorcycles were parked undercover in case of rain while five children and two ladies piled into the D-Max with me. A few minutes later, we turned up to the party in the back-blocks of Kuala Dipang dressed in T-shirts and sports pants. Satay, rice, tom yam, chicken and lots of Bahasa Melayu later, we sloshed through the now-monsoonal rain back into the D-Max and I delivered the poor souls back to their motorcycles, from whence they would ride home. It was a somewhat surreal experience, a white English-speaker gate-crashing a party of Malays who spoke virtually no English and whom I had never met before, sitting barefoot on the floor of a humble home connected to the world by a tiny thread of bitumen that wove between houses and trees back to the main road. Netball is transpiring to be educational and an amazing cultural experience as well as great exercise.