“The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.“
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013). He was a South African anti-apartheid revolutionary, political leader, and philanthropist.
I remember two brothers who were close to my family in the late 1950s. This was around the time when I was about to start in Primary 1 at our village school.
Alek (short for Alexander) and his younger brother, Liyam (originally William), were quite a pair. Incredibly close, as only brothers can be, they were sturdy, healthy boys. While their family wasn’t wealthy, they weren’t destitute either.
What stood out about them was their cheerful demeanour. They always seemed to have a smile on their faces, even in tough times. I remember a particularly severe flood that devastated our farms one season, but even then, they remained resilient.
We used to take the same path through the jungle to our farms, although theirs was about half a mile farther. Occasionally, they’d stop by our place on their way to or from the farm.
According to my mother, when I was about a year old, tragedy struck the boys at the ages of 16 and 14, respectively. Their father passed away.
Two years later, they lost their mother to a mysterious illness. Suddenly, at the ages of 18 and 16, Alex and Liyam found themselves orphaned.
Yet despite their hardships, they continued to work on their farm and generously shared their harvest with us – cassava leaves, tubers, taro, yams, fish, smoked squirrels, and more.
They loved fishing, hunting, and trapping wild animals in the surrounding jungle, and never failed to share their bounties with us.
They were especially skilled in trapping wild green pigeons that were considered delicacies by all the folks in the farming community.
They always treated my mother with utmost respect and kindness, perhaps due to their longing for their mother or maybe it was my mother’s kindness towards them.
Seeing their plight, I didn’t mind ‘sharing’ my mother’s affection with them. They became like the older brothers I never had.
One evening, when I was seven years old and in Primary 1, and Alex and Liyam were 22 and 20, respectively, they came to our farmhouse for some advice over dinner.
Sixty-three years had passed since then, but I still remember the adults sitting cross-legged on a rattan mat on the floor engaged in a lively discussion.
It was after dinner and night had fallen. From inside my mosquito net, I tried to listen but I couldn’t fully comprehend the depth of their conversation.
Soon it was past my bedtime, and with each passing minute, my eyelids got heavier and heavier and before I knew it, I was fast asleep.
What transpired that night was unknown to me until the following year during the onset of the new paddy farming season.
Whereas before, the boys farmed downstream of us, that year they worked on a new plot of land just past our immediate upstream neighbours — a couple and their three little children.
The land belonged to their grandparents who had given the right to it to their late mother.
They maintained their old farm but paid more attention to their new venture. The land must first be properly “tamed” to accept the first-ever paddy crop.
To go to their new farm, they and our immediate neighbour shared a path that snaked quite close to our farmhouse, which made it convenient for them to visit us whenever they felt like it. It also meant that I could easily walk to their farm whenever I wanted to see them.
By and by, after several visits, I noticed that in the morning, they worked on their farm and spent many an afternoon helping a family whose farm was just upstream of theirs.
At first, I thought that they did it to earn some wages, but I quickly learned that they were helping because the father in the family had been unwell for quite a while and was in no condition to work the land.
This story could have ended here, but skipping ahead nine years to when I was 15 years old and in Form 3, I got word that the brothers were going to get married just before Christmas.
This was in 1968 when I was away from the village attending a government boarding secondary school.
I had not seen them for three years, so the news surprised me because I did not even know that they had any love interests.
Unfortunately, as often happens in life, I came to a fork in the road before the beginning of the school holiday in mid-November that year.
A cousin, who had an elder brother in Kuching, proposed that instead of going home to the village, we could try to find temporary work to earn some pocket money for the following year’s school season.
That made a lot of sense as I wanted to get a taste of how to be quite financially independent of my family, but my heart was heavy because I wanted to attend Alek and Liyam’s joint wedding.
I feared that things might happen to prevent me from returning to the village in time.
When the time came, though, common sense prevailed and I opted to go to Kuching. And to make a long story short, I missed the wedding.
Sad and pissed off with life in general, I deliberately skipped Christmas and the New Year celebrations and returned directly from Kuching back to school.
As in previous years, the new school year brought new students, and new friends, and cemented existing friendships.
It did not take long for the busyness of handling school activities to make me forget about the disappointment of missing Alex and Liyam’s weddings.
Still, when the opportunity presented itself during a school-break in the first quarter of the year, I rushed back to the village and from there walked to our family’s paddy farm. It was so satisfying to see my family and the brothers again.
It transpired that they were forewarned about my coming by a friend the week before, and when I arrived, they were waiting for me with a grand lunch.
As it happened, I was utterly and pleasantly surprised that Alex and Liyam’s wives were sisters, the daughters in the family that they had been helping all those years.
To put it mildly, I was gobsmacked in the nicest way possible because I knew the girls well and had always treated them like they were my elder sisters.
I was also glad that the father of the girls had recovered his health and had been a productive member of the family like he was before illness struck him down.
He was unable to work for quite some time because his shoulder was dislocated. Somehow, the brothers found in another village a man who had the skill to reset the bone to its proper position.
It is easy to imagine how grateful he must have been, which explained why he was so happy to have the brothers as his sons-in-law.
I’m really into symbolism, so when I think back on it all these years later, I still see the brothers as symbols of toughness, never giving up, and the strong bonds between families.
Despite all the tough stuff they went through, they stayed upbeat, showing how people can still find happiness and meaning even when things are rough.
Plus, when they helped out their neighbour, it showed they cared, and it reminded me that we’re all connected and should look out for each other.
Psychologically, maybe the brothers stayed positive because of the hard stuff they faced early on. Their ability to keep going and be generous even when life was tough showed how important it is to stay mentally strong when things get hard.
Since this all happened in a small farming community, it shows how important it is for communities to stick together and help each other.
In sharing what they had and helping others out, the brothers showed the values of giving back and looking out for each other.
The story also makes me think about big questions like what it means to be tough, the importance of family, and why being kind matters in life. It reminds me that we’re all connected and that being caring and nice can change lives.
In telling this story, I’m exploring how people can bounce back from tough times, how communities come together, and how kindness can make a difference. These are themes that everyone can relate to, no matter where or when they’re from.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the New Sarawak Tribune.
