Angan, around three years old, was found to have a serious heart defect during a medical visit to her kampong. She was brought back to Gombak and was treated with medication. Sometime later, she was flown to USA with help from some benefactors, but unfortunately the surgeons found that there was nothing they could do for her. She returned to Gombak and continued as before. I do not know if she returned to her kampong.
This woman is sitting in her family lean-to shelter surrounded by some of the typical accoutrements of Batek life. Beside her are a bamboo blowpipe dart quiver, some pandanus baskets, some wadded up cloth sarongs, a pile of uncooked takop tubers (Dioscorea orbiculata), and a charred section of bamboo which has been used for cooking. Behind her, stuck in the thatch, are some sections of blowpipe bamboo, and in front, hanging from a pole, is a bundle of pith that will be used to make the butt-cones of blowpipe darts.
This building was used to teach the children in the basic "3Rs" in Malay. They were always very eager to learn. The Field Staff also used the classrooms to learn English. This was usually taught by visiting European teachers from Kuala Lumpur on a voluntary basis. The building also had a four bed ward for paraplegic patients who would most likely spend the rest of their lives at Gombak.
This man is applying coats of poison to newly made blowpipe darts. The latex of the poison tree (Antiaris toxicaria) has been dried on a bamboo spatula, which is stored in a thin bamboo tube. Here he is heating the spatula to soften the poison and then rolling the tips of the darts in the sticky poison. A bundle of pith from a type of rattan vine, which will be made into dart butt-cones, dries over the fire.
Adolescent boys, sometimes together with girls, often live in separate shelters from their parents and do some of their own cooking. Here some boys are cooking dumplings made from wheat flour obtained by trade.
Most meat in the Batek diet comes from arboreal game (monkeys, gibbons, squirrels, etc.) killed by means of blowpipes and poisoned darts. Blowpipes consist of inner and outer tubes of thin-walled bamboo, each tube composed of two lengths of bamboo spliced end-to-end. To make a blowpipe or replace a section of an existing blowpipe, one dries a length of blowpipe bamboo over a fire, wiping and straightening it in the process, as this boy is doing here.
Busu, a Semai woman had returned from Kuala Lumpur where she had undergone surgery. She was taught to walk again using a zimmer walking frame donated by a UK womens organization.
