High in the mountains of Malaysia lies a remote and isolated village. The impoverished villagers had one meal a day with only one hope for tomorrow--that there would be another meal.

Fortunately, things have changed. They've improved their lives and are capable of helping others as well. How? It's all thanks to bananas...

Range upon range of mountains enfold an aboriginal village in Bukit Asu, where Kawa, 47, and his wife Mela, 39, raise five children. Like their ancestors, generation after generation have lived deep in these secluded mountains. With bare feet and bodies, children run here and there with the wilderness as their playground. In the eyes of their parents, education is a luxury while having adequate food and clothing is a priority.

In a cottage built of woven palm leaves and bamboo, Kawa and his family live on the streaks of light peeking through the cracks of the shed. At night, it gets blindingly dark, so they have to retire early. Squalid poverty roams throughout the house, in which a radio is the most valuable item.

What is civilization? What is technology? From the unsophisticated and simple face of Kawa, we find not the slightest hint to the answers to those questions.

The intrusion of modern civilization

Kawa's appearance resembles that of other aboriginals in Bukit Asu: short, thin, dark, with a flat nose, thick lips, and curly hair. It is from such attributes that the people get their nickname, "Small Black People."

Aboriginals in the Malaysian Peninsula comprise a total of 130,000 people in 18 tribes scattered around the area. The majority of them live in Perak Province in the center of the peninsula. Located in the northern area of the province, 21 kilometers from the town of Keroh, is the hamlet of Bukit Asu. Long ago, ancestors of the Orang Asli Kintak moved in with their families and settled there. They lived by hunting and by collecting fruit and vegetables in the wild. They were one of the most impoverished tribes with the poorest skills to earn their living.

In a mountainous area at an altitude of 1,100 meters, the aboriginals in Bukit Asu live a primitive yet satisfying life aloof from worldly success. They hardly ever complain about the hardships in their lives. Their simple nature and contented personalities are somehow seen as indolent and undisciplined in the eyes of city dwellers. Their living space has been slowly intruded upon by modern ideology.

When there is profit to be made, lumbering companies go as far as they can to log the forests in these steep mountains. Deforestation has transformed the mountains into plain wasteland and the lake has become a pool of still, dead water. Along with all this, the wild fruit and vegetables are gone, thus affecting the traditional aboriginal way of life. Men have started looking for jobs outside of their villages. Some try to collect and sell rattan, some work as guards, others even take on plantation jobs in orchards.

Unstable jobs and unemployment are the norm. Never sure of the next meal, the whole family must minimize their basic needs in order to get by. Sometimes parents are unable to support their families with sufficient food, shelter and clothing, let alone provide their children with an education. These children have never been to school, which leads to a serious communication problem with the outside world. Incapable of surviving in the modern world, they suffer the fate of outcasts in society.

In the village

Kawa earns his living by selling palm leaves. In his spare time, he works as a temporary laborer building fences or clearing weeds. If he is lucky, he earns as much as 20 ringgit a month (roughly US$5.30). If not, he earns nothing at all. Then he and his family must travel over a mountain to another village to search for something edible.

In August 1998, Kawa saw for the first time in his life some "foreigners" in blue shirts and white pants visiting the villages. "From their hands, we received so much food. Other than sweet potatoes and wild vegetables, we now have rice, oil and other food in our kitchen," Kawa said happily. "Now, we can have two meals a day."

Tzu Chi volunteer Chi Chung recalled his first time to Bukit Asu. The shabby houses there, with four pillars and palm-leaf roofs, could barely ward off the wind and rain. Without electricity or running water, several households shared one faucet, where they cooked, drank, washed clothes, and bathed, thus making it a hotbed of contagious diseases. If one person became infected with ophthalmia, soon all the villagers would have blood-shot eyes.

Tzu Chuang, another Tzu Chi volunteer, said that what impressed her most during their first visit were the children, who appeared extremely thin and weak due to long-term malnutrition. They even had mucus stuck in their noses and pus that filled their ears. "The first time we arrived was at three in the afternoon. A mother was just starting to prepare some bamboo shoots, the only meal of the day."

Volunteers decided to contribute food and daily necessities to the villagers in the hope of satisfying their basic needs.

Forty households accommodate 139 villagers in Bukit Asu. Without any means of transportation, villagers must spend several hours walking to town for work or for shopping. That's why they seldom interact with the world outside of the village. When Tzu Chi volunteers in their "exotic" clothes visited the village for the first time, the aboriginal women were so worried that they ushered their children into the houses and locked themselves inside. Since the villagers wouldn't come out, Tzu Chi volunteers could only place food and supplies outside each household. Gradually, after several months, the villagers dropped their guard and came out of their houses to meet with the volunteers.

Charity cannot be provided to aboriginal people unless there is permission from the proper government office. On November 28, 1998, volunteers returned to Bukit Asu with a permission certificate. The distribution work has persisted rain or shine ever since. Sixty-four application forms have been submitted for 64 separate distributions.

House numbers on water barrels

Households in the village have no doorplates. Some villagers don't even have formal names.

Pregnant women deliver their children anywhere, such as deep in the mountains or in orchards. It is common for mothers to die during childbirth. When new infants are born, mothers start to nurture them. The thought of birth registration had never crossed their mind before someone from outside asked how old their children were. With no writing system of their own, the villagers are illiterate, so birth registration officials or nurses frequently name the children for the villagers.

However, villagers still call each other by their own names. They sometimes introduce themselves as Durian [a kind of fruit] or Cane.

To create a name list for relief distributions, Tzu Chi volunteer Wang Tien painted numbers on houses. He is thus able to keep track of the information on every household, such as the number of children, their names, and their ages. On each distribution day, villagers carry barrels to the designated location and wait patiently. Their house numbers are clearly marked on the barrel so that Tzu Chi volunteers can conveniently and efficiently distribute the proper relief supplies to each household.

When villagers become mildly sick or ill, they are treated with herbs; those with critical conditions must face their fate. One year, joined by medical students from the University of Malaya, medical workers from the Tzu Chi International Medical Association held a free clinic in the village. They came to the conclusion that malnutrition, roundworms, lice, skin diseases, and contagious diseases were all common problems among the villagers.

Children run through the mountains with bare feet. When they are hungry, they grab whatever they see and eat it with their dirty hands. Many short, thin children carry swollen stomachs. The medical students from Malaysia University, with their medical boxes and folded sleeves, had to chase these children around to treat their lice-infested heads, clear their wounds, or take care of their skin diseases. The happiest thing for the children was that they got candy and jelly after the treatments.

Some aboriginal mothers, in their simple lives, don't remember how many children they have, what they are called, or even what order they had been born in. It would be impossible for these mothers to remember to give their children vitamins or pills for roundworms. Therefore, Tzu Chi volunteers also do this job.

A hoe and thousands of banana seedlings

The regular distributions held by Tzu Chi support the aboriginals' daily lives. However, the question arose of how to help them become self-sufficient. Easily maintained banana plants became the solution. Three years ago, volunteers brought thousands of banana seedlings and gave each household a hoe. Volunteers with agricultural expertise taught the aboriginals plantation skills.

The village is built on a semi-quagmire, or land with a soft, muddy surface. When the rainy season comes, the village is flooded, often wiping out their harvest. Volunteer Chi Chung, who runs his own orchard, came up with the brilliant idea of building ditches to drain off the floodwater. When the earth along the banks of the ditches gets dry, villagers can start sowing their seeds. It takes only six months for a full harvest.

After finding a suitable piece of land, volunteers started teaching people how to cultivate the land, dig ditches, sow seeds, and apply fertilizer. Every step was extremely difficult for the aboriginals, who were exposed for the first time to this kind of knowledge. Chi Chung said, "Sometimes they forgot what you had just taught them the day before, such as the way to use a hoe and sow seeds." Therefore, the patience and perseverance of Tzu Chi volunteers played an important role.

Kawa, inexperienced in plantation work, started by sowing all the banana seeds together; there was no fruit. Kawa said, "Tzu Chi volunteers taught me how to grow the seeds and apply fertilizer. Now we can have a good harvest." A fruit vendor visits the village once or twice a week. Kawa now earns 50 to 60 ringgit (about US$13) every time the vendor drops by. The more he plants, the more fruitful the harvest. Kawa now makes ten times what he earned by selling palm leaves!

Stable income and regular distributions conducted by Tzu Chi volunteers bring hope to Kawa. Now he no longer worries about his family starving. He has time to plant more banana trees and even other kinds of trees to make more profit. Kawa said, "I can eventually save some money." In the 40 years of his life, Kawa had never dreamed of having a bankbook of his own.

Deforestation by the logging companies once made hunting and wild fruit collecting impossible. Kawa was inflicted with worries of how to support his family. Now that he is free of stress, his life has become more colorful.

Tzu Chi volunteers were named "Gratitude"

Forty-three-year-old Din, who lives in house number three, lives not far away from Kawa's house. He has nine children, of whom the youngest is two years old. Din's children used to move around with him as he worked at odd jobs on farms. Even when it rained, his children had to do farm work along with him. Otherwise, they would not have been able to support themselves. "Since Tzu Chi volunteers came to the village, I'm not worried about rainy days anymore," Din said. "We don't have to move here and there any longer. Now I sell bananas and other fruit as well. We even have surplus fruit to eat."

"It is so good to have these banana trees." Din said that his life had been transformed since Tzu Chi volunteers came to the village five years ago. When he sees people in blue T-shirts and white pants in town, he turns his thumbs up and says, "Thank you, thank you." "Without Tzu Chi," Din said, "We would have continued to lead our miserable and impoverished lives."

On December 5, 2003, Din and 21 other villagers traveled to the town of Baling, Kedah, which had been flooded and classified as a disaster area. In vests carrying the Tzu Chi logo, they joined Tzu Chi volunteers in clearing debris from the flooded area. Din was willing to put away his own work for the day because, as he said, "I've learned that I should give to others as well."

During the past five years, aboriginals in Bukit Asu have experienced a mental journey from xenophobia (the fear of foreigners or strangers) to selfless giving. Tzu Chi volunteers assisted the poor to become self-sufficient and even taught them to willingly dedicate themselves to helping others. They have truly carried out the Tzu Chi ideal of "Help the poor and educate the rich to share what they have with the underprivileged."

Tzu Chi volunteers used to spend 30 minutes in a four-wheel-drive vehicle commuting from a comfortable asphalt road in Keroh to a rocky, winding mountain road. The bumpy rides always turned their stomachs upside down.

Now the government has started to improve the infrastructure of the area. The rocky, winding road has been paved with asphalt. Children in the village enjoy the privilege of free education. If the next generation gets the chance to receive an education, the label of "illiterate" will soon fade and the children will be able to join mainstream society.

Chi Chung urges the aboriginals to take part in the second plantation plan. By growing quality bananas, farmers can double their profits. Chi Chung hopes the first batch of aboriginals who have joined the second plantation plan will serve as role models and not give up halfway. By demonstrating their determination and persistence, they can inspire other villagers to join them. However, there is still some worry about the health problems of the aboriginals. Tzu Chi volunteers are now appealing to the government for a solution.

Something as insignificant as bananas has helped the aboriginals to support their families. Kawa found hope in a hopeless situation; Din transformed himself from receiving to giving help to others. The affection between local Tzu Chi volunteers and aboriginals has created unlimited possibilities.