“Did you see the slum just south of town?” We were having dinner with my colleague Nate and his family at a local Malaysian restaurant in Kota Kinabula.
I hadn’t.I was a little surprised when Nate explained to me where the slum was located. It was right in between the heart of downtown Kota Kinabalu and the five-star Sutera Pacific resort. I had traveled this route; it was wall-to-wall hotels and other tourist amenities. Or so I thought.
The next morning, while the girls and Julie slept in, I grabbed my camera, slipped out of the hotel room, and started walking south out of town.
Ten minutes later, I was standing at the entrance of the water village slum. Sure enough, the village was hemmed in by high-rise hotels of varying degrees of luxuriousness. I now understood why I’d missed it when we’d ridden past it: the government of Kota Kinabalu had erected a ten-foot high, corrugated metal wall all the way around the village. At the northeast corner where I now stood, was a forty-foot gap in the fence with a wide dirt path leading into the village.
The village is on the site of a former mangrove. The water was still there but the trees were long gone –torn down to make way for houses which were little more than huts. The houses were all built on stilts to elevate them above the water. A network of very crudely built boardwalks zigzagged through the haphazard arrangement of wooden houses.
Sadly, the water that was next to, around, and under the houses had become a giant cesspool from all of the garbage that had been dumped into it over the years. Plastic bottles, broken flip flops, and discarded toys created a dense covering of flotsam.
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