by Natasha Halim, AAMEP 2023

Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam

If you are fortunate enough to have the opportunity to visit Brunei, one of the places you are likely to visit is the water village or “Kampung Air”. While many are enthralled by the arresting sight of houses on stilts as far as the eye can see, most are taken aback when they discover that Kampung Air is almost entirely self-sufficient. Within the giant mass of houses on stilts, you have specific villages, each with its own headman, a hospital, a mosque, shops, restaurants, a museum, schools, a petrol station and essentially everything you would require for your day-to-day life.

Whilst I personally was not and am not a resident of Kampung Air, I had the great privilege recently of speaking to a colleague who lived his entire young life on the water village, only moving to land when he went to university. He spoke of a simple but fulfilling life with more than a little tinge of nostalgia. Growing up, his family did not own a car as there was no need for one. Instead they owned a little boat used to get to the further reaches of the village when required and also for his father to eke out a living as a fisherman. He explained that this was fairly standard and there were many families who similarly did not feel the need to own a car. I was intrigued to discover that the more affluent amongst them who owned cars parked their cars in carparks on land that were close to jetties as this enabled them quick access to their boats to get home. It was only after learning this that I understood why there was always a sudden influx of cars headed towards the capital after work and also why there were always so many cars parked close to the river.

My colleague shared that he did his schooling on schools located on the water until he completed his secondary education. Comparing his experiences of school on the water and on the land, he reflected that schooling on stilts was much easier for him. Kampung Air is connected by a series of wooden walkways and on them you can get to most places on foot. Getting to school in the morning when he was educated in the village was as simple as walking out his front door and taking a ten minute walk to school. Most often, on his way he would be joined by or he himself would join a group of friends also headed that way. For the children that lived a little further away, there would be boats called “temuai”’ that would take them from the jetty closest to their home to the jetty closest to school, but he considered this option considerably less fun, as you couldn’t interact with your friends as much. Beyond the logistics of getting to school, he didn’t feel that being educated on a school on stilts was much different in substance to being educated on land. The school curriculum was the same nationwide, and the only concession to being on the water in terms of being taught was that Physical Education classes were mostly limited to sports that could be played in the school hall. He felt that for the teachers, however, being posted to a school on stilts was much more of an inconvenience as most of them were not residents of Kampung Air and had to be brought in on school-run water taxis every morning.

The population of Kampung Air is, however, shrinking, as more and more people choose to move to land, most often to pursue employment. My colleague’s family is no exception. While they have kept their family home in the water village, it now houses only his grandparents during the week, though the rest of the family does congregate there on the weekends. With the diminishing population of young people who live on the water, in recent years we have seen many schools on stilts close down. It seems unlikely that this trend will change and it is my belief that, sadly, those recollections of a carefree childhood, of walking down the wooden pathways to school with your friends, are numbered, and will soon exist only in the memories of a select few.