A former volunteer for CUSO (Canadian University Service Overseas) recalls those halcyon years living and working in Sabah, Borneo in the entertaining travel memoir Finding Myself in Borneo: Sojourns in Sabah.
Author Neill McKee vividly describes his escalating culture shock as he encounters “the East” in its many aspects: sights, smells and, notably, sweltering temperatures. In the sleepy village of Kota Belud, he learns Malay and teaches various subjects in English to students barely fluent in that language, often with no textbooks. Humorously imagining exotic Borneo as the model for Tolkien’s Middle Earth, he and his friends found the North Borneo Frodo Society, gaining international recognition. The author has since returned to Borneo, reviving happy memories but saddened at the devastation through logging of the once dense rainforest there.
Readers will find themselves well informed about Borneo and its people through the pages of this engaging chronicle. McKee’s insights about his time as an outsider integrating into an unfamiliar country are charmingly written, and compellingly honest. His initial challenges, gradually followed by immersion in and love for his assigned overseas home, will resonate with anyone who has traveled far or worked in a foreign land, and will inspire others to do the same.
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