Within a year they cost me a month's Peace Corps subsistence allowance. When villagers finally let me go to bed, it is still not easy to rest. Bed is a bamboo floor five feet above the murk of the under-house pigsty, chicken pen, community dump, and toilet. Nightly the mangy dog packs trot the long porches where we sleep, and occasionally stop by for a friendly sniff and scratch. Light sleep is sometimes possible just prior to 5 a.m., the beginning of a new day.
People ask if life here is hard and strange.
If ever I took time to think, things would seem hard and strange. But the day's tasks leave little time for thinking, and the Iban ways quietly become my own. By new definition, a floor becomes a bed, and rice a meal. Fifteen miles per hour becomes a reasonable speed for travel, and a loincloth is accepted dress for an lban. Some have also asked if the lbans' law and customs interfere with my work.