Mythbusters: Brunei episode

Tonight, some claims about the Bruneian character are examined in the light of experience.

Myth 1
Bruneians won't confront you if you offend them, but will act behind your back.
A note I wrote on a public notice offended a department head. She had reason to be offended, though I had reason to be angry about the content of the notice. However she said nothing to me about it but complained instead to someone in authority over her. I was reprimanded by this other person. The head of department and I were then to carry on, in our shared workspace, as if this dispute had never occurred. The same thing happened when I inadvertently caused offence to a government inspector who treated me with incredible (until that all-too-real moment) contempt on a very busy workday.









Revenge for real or perceived slights will be secretive, bitter and cowardly.


Myth 2
Bruneians don't criticise the Sultan.
I was often the recipient of complaints from one of the Bruneians I befriended about the royal family's complete dominance of local property and business assets, to the exclusion of ordinary citizens. He also objected to the fact that waving banners and looking happy at the Sultan's birthday ceremony was compulsory for all citizens unlucky enough to be press-ganged into this task.









As is the case in repressive countries elsewhere, the story behind closed doors is different from the official one.


Myth 3
Bruneians don't show their emotions in public.
I saw a male teacher explode with rage, screaming at and shoving two young male students against an office corridor wall. He had to be restrained from striking them physically by two other male staff members. On another occasion I saw a female staff member run to her desk and collapse in loud tearful sobs as a result of an unfortunate encounter with the school principal. The students themselves showed the same gamut of emotions and behaviours that children around the world will show in repressive, regimented settings.









Believe the line about 'Asian inscrutability' when you see evidence for it in your dealings with Asian people.

The happy expat teacher in Brunei

The happy expat teacher in Brunei:

• Is fleeing desperate circumstances in their home country
• Is married and whose spouse is non-working
• Is aged over 50 and has no interest in further career development
• Is at the top of the expat teacher’s pay scale
• Has heavy financial obligations in Brunei or their home country
• Enjoys the support of a live-in amah (maid)
• Has young children who would be ruinously expensive to educate privately in their home country
• Has wide experience of, is at ease with, and/or is at least indifferent to, schooling and living standards in the third world
• Is uninterested in cultural or artistic activities
• Is comfortable with rigid and hierarchical working environments.

If you are not at least five of these things, you can expect to be an unhappy expat teacher in Brunei.

A personal view of Bruneian culture and politics

In Brunei's history since the discovery of oil within its borders, both as a dependency and a sovereign nation it has achieved little but to trim its hedges, and that with foreign labour. Culturally and economically Brunei is moribund. Its economic fortunes are tied to the global market for petroleum. Its sole productive industry apart from oil is the manufacture of prawn-flavoured crisps. As an oil-exporting nation during a world-wide energy squeeze, Brunei experienced negative economic growth in the 2008-2009 financial year. With the immense wealth of its oil revenues it has constructed a large teapot and a polo field. It is a world leader in pen-and-ink-based bureaucratic paperwork.

The cultural position of Brunei is equally dire. The mind-numbing national ideology of MIB (Malay Islamic Monarchy) is intended to keep society locked in its own hopelessness, self-admiring mendacity and costiveness from top to bottom. There are no prospects in Brunei for advancement in its socioeconomic structures by virtue of merit. All positions of economic and political influence are dominated by the royal elite. It has no democratic elections and a sham parliament dominated by the Sultan. A large portion of its people live in poverty. They are literate in Malay but the state-controlled media ensure there is little of value to read. Social structure is rigidly Islamic, with the habits of mindless obedience and self-punishment this entails. Like other such societies Brunei mutilates the genitals of its children – a practice so eloquently expressive of a culture’s degree of respect for the young. Domestic violence is rife and drug-related crime endemic from one end of the country to the other. In its prison stands a gallows.

The stasis and rigidity of Brunei’s social structure renders the schooling process meaningless. School is a sorting system which serves to supply an industrialised society with labour, but in Brunei’s case there is nothing for which to sort. I taught students who were resigned, with a kind of polite despair, to a future without any hope of a well-paid job; who knew they had little chance of reaching a horizon that extended beyond their kampong or the one trashy mall in town; kids whose big break in the routine of school, religious school, mosque and sleep was marching once per year to honour the depredations of their own monarch. In two decades of ‘improvements’ to Brunei’s education outcomes, the country’s statistics of student performance have been improved by nothing except the progressive lowering of the pass mark in country-wide exams.

I say all this out of pity and dismay, and with some individual Bruneians in mind, whose dealings with me were always polite and forgiving of the flailings of an intruder who finds his expectations of the decently lived human life defeated one by one in a series of disheartening encounters. Local people often were eager to talk to me about how wrong things were in Brunei, but in our resignation to the fact that these matters must remain at the level of gossip there was a shared sense of defeat by larger forces. I keep my strongest feelings of sympathy for people of intelligence and sensitivity in Brunei - those who have a greater awareness of the unjust situation in which they live than, say, the abject housewives who jostle to fill their plastic bags with free food laid on for the Sultan’s birthday - those who have been penalised, demoted, sacked, denied employment or imprisoned because of their willingness to speak publicly about the ghastliness of their own country and its overlords, or just because they were of the wrong race or religion.

Quotations from Brunei

Quotations with responses. Quotations are given as accurately as I can recall them. My clever replies come some months after I heard the quoted comment, after my mind had been cleared of distress.

‘As a teacher here, you will be the servant of two masters.’
The important word here is ‘servant’.

‘Sometimes mediocrity is something to aim for.’
You, as an expat teacher, of course, will be policed, scrutinised and held to the highest standards at all times, on pain of harassment and eventual dismissal.

‘Why haven’t you completed [this item of paperwork]? It is a Ministry requirement.’
I was too busy preparing lessons, researching and photocopying materials, teaching, marking papers and adapting to life in a new country.

‘What the school would like for teachers to do is to “cooperate”, which means, erm, that you will sometimes be asked to do things that in other circumstances you might not really want to do.’
In a fair workplace you would simply refuse to do such things.

‘This place is going downhill.’
Agreed.

‘It was never like this ten years ago when I first came. We had so much fun back then.’
The ‘ten years ago’ bit wasn’t mentioned in the brochures. Typo?

‘The Ministry really needs to get over its paperwork fetish.’
The Burmese military junta needs to get over its dictatorship fetish, but I don’t think it will do so voluntarily, that is, ever: do you?

A personal view of teacher recruitment in Brunei

Here as elsewhere in this blog I make no suggestion that the information is from other sources than my own observations and opinions.

The recruiting agent claims a number of things to be true about its operations. These claims you can read on its Web site, accessible on a Google search with the words ‘Brunei teaching’. Whether the agency’s employees and managers believe these claims to be true or not, one fact stands in plain contradiction to them. The recruiting agent that operates in Brunei is under a head contract which obliges it to provide teacher recruitment services to the Ministry of Education in return for payment. Therefore everything that the Ministry wishes to impose on government-employed teachers in Brunei, the recruitment agency must allow. Please be clear on this before you are told the opposite by the recruiting agent. The agency has no binding influence on the conditions of work that apply to government-employed teachers in Brunei. It cannot set any of the conditions of work by definition of its contractually bound relationship to the Ministry. It never shall be otherwise as long as that contract exists. This is a fatally compromised position, except for the purposes of making money.

The agency is unable to effect institutional change in the education system or the Ministry. It is in the same compromised position as the court advisor to the King in feudal times, the latter possessing the right to have the former beheaded if his advice is unwelcome. I believe that as a consequence of this, the agency has turned most of its energies to the relationship that it can control: the subsidiary contractual agreement that it makes with individual foreign teachers. It becomes the second of the slave’s two masters. I do not have enough legal training or money to challenge the terms of the contract that I signed with the agency, and I doubt that it is legal, at least in Brunei, to publish details of the contract on the Internet. However, I urge anyone who has been offered a contract with this agency in Brunei to look carefully for any part of it that specifies (i) the physical and practical conditions in which the teacher will work, or (ii) the maximum number of hours they may work per week under the terms of the contract. The employment contract is devoid of those specifics because it is not in the power of the parties to determine them. That power belongs to the Bruneian Ministry of Education.

If they can pull the contract round you, the agency gains an advantage: the conditions, nature and quantity of work that actually obtain in Brunei’s government schools are converted to hearsay. The facts continue to exist, but to the newly contracted teacher they are facts only checkable from the physical, ground-level position of a job in Brunei. Hearsay makes up a large portion of the telephone interview that applicants will receive. Not having been contractually defined, working conditions will be described as the recruiting representative personally has heard of, or experienced them. Here, psychological bias will play a large part in how the information about working conditions is both divulged and interpreted. Confirmation bias on the part of the applicant is to be expected: having landed a new job, often in order to escape an unsatisfying job at home, the applicant will be reluctant to accept the evidence of his own ears when such red flags as ‘split weekend’ and ‘record book’ are raised by an earnest and cheerful recruitment representative. The interests of the representative in creating a positive impression of the job are obvious.

Recruitment of foreign English teachers in Brunei is arranged so that details of working conditions and responsibilities in written form will only be revealed during the two-week orientation program after the applicant has committed to international relocation. I estimate that had I actually packed my baggage and taken a flight home at my own expense during the orientation phase, I would have saved myself at least $7,000 in unnecessary purchases of motor vehicle loan deposit and repairs, furniture, freight charges and other household goods, apart from gaining the obvious benefit of avoiding months of exploitation in a bizarre social and working environment and its associated psychological distress.

There is a contradiction in the stated aims of the recruitment agent and its political position in Brunei. The agency’s Web site and its orientation course for newcomers emphasise the non-changeable nature of Brunei. They present Bruneian culture as ideologically and practically sacrosanct. However, if students’ English proficiency is to develop through highly-trained foreign teachers’ efforts as the agency also says it would like, then the way things are done in Brunei, beginning with the way English is taught and learnt at high school and primary school level in Brunei, must change. It is just not possible that at the same time as English proficiency in Brunei improves, nothing about Brunei’s education system changes.

The Brunei department of the recruitment agent, which is a global organisation, has become infected by the hopelessness of Brunei’s case as a nation. I suggest that people responding to this blog, if they are able to do so anonymously, include the name of the agency in their comments so that the name is captured in search engine references to this blog site. I take no responsibility for what people responding to this blog might wish to say about that agency, while welcoming their full and frank opinions.

Brunei: The pitch and the reality

THE PITCH
THE REALITY

1 The schools
English is the language of instruction in schools.
This is untrue of most schools, most local teachers and most students. It is common for schools to give announcements and to hold staff and student meetings entirely in Malay. Generally, standards of spoken English among students have, if anything, declined in the last twenty years.

You won’t work as hard here as you do in your home country. There will be so much more free time than you had at home.
Yes you will, and no there won’t be. Because you will be assigned a combination, or all, of the following:

1. responsibility for up to five classes of 30 students or more
2. record-keeping duties that entail writing detailed lesson plans for all classes, to be submitted every week in advance and subject to Ministry inspection (‘I spent six hours preparing my first set of lesson plans for the record book,’ an inspector told newcomers, as if this was exemplary behaviour)
3. student toilet cleaning duties
4. exam preparation tutorial classes outside normal working hours
5. double shifts over extended periods in which you must work twice the hours for which you are paid
6. attendance and supervision duties for external activities (ie activities such as royal birthday marches not held on weekdays or at school)
7. oral examination duties for hours each day after school hours, for which you will be paid less than your own domestic servants
8. exam paper writing, photocopying and hand-collating duties
9. sport and/or recreational club teaching and supervising duties
10. labour-intensive clerical work, data entry and letter-writing tasks relating to student attendance.

You should use your professional knowledge to raise the standard of students’ English.
If you choose to apply your professional knowledge in a Brunei classroom, you will do so exclusively at your own expense of time, energy and money and without any recognition whatsoever. Your professional knowledge and teaching methodology are not required in Brunei. You have been hired as a source of labour in a task for which there are presently no Bruneians available. As such you will do exactly as the Ministry of Education tells you to do. This is to coach students for, then mark (noting every student error in red pen), then record in a closely specified format the results of three written compositions, three comprehension tasks and three oral tasks every three weeks for each class that you teach. These are not suggested servings or recommended dosages. They are absolute directives and your faithfulness to them will be enforced by Ministry inspectors. Inspectors may arrive in your staffroom, or classroom during a lesson, at any time during the year and with no prior warning to see how you are getting along.


The schools vary quite a bit. You might get a good school or a not-so-good school.
I know of no school in Brunei, new or old, well-regarded or otherwise, that could not be accurately described as follows:

• Is in a grubby, run-down condition, with missing or broken tiles and electrical fittings, damaged or unsurfaced yards and/or structural damage to walls, floors and ceilings
• Has dirty staff toilets without soap, hand driers and/or paper towels
• Has limited workspace and/or storage space for staff
• Has bare-walled, tiled classrooms with very poor acoustic properties
• Has a limited or non-existent book library
• Has very few, or no air-conditioned classrooms
• Has limited computer resources, or has a large number of computers to which there is no access or which are non-functional
• Has incompetent, evasive administrative staff, including disciplinary staff, who cannot or will not support teachers in their day-to-day administrative or behaviour management needs
• Has open staffrooms that are gathering-places and thoroughfares for any and all students at all times
• Has a problem with thefts of staff possessions from open staffrooms
• Usually holds assemblies and staff meetings without notice and for up to 2 hours at a time
• Has a poorly trained, frivolous yet dictatorial principal
• Is administratively disorganised
• Makes limited or no allowance for non-Malay speakers in its staff (eg, in written memos and other notices to staff).

2 The Lifestyle
The houses are big.
The houses, in fact, are too big: houses with five or six bedrooms and bathrooms, all of them dingy, tiled, bare caves, are commonplace in Brunei. Those on the rental market are visibly pre-loved, as in other housing markets worldwide. The big houses and their furnishings, if offered, are also very ugly, but individual tastes vary on these matters. You may find a house satisfying in most respects except for its rusting outdoor washing machine, or liability to flooding, or non-operational air conditioner. In addition to its big houses, Brunei has big mosques and also many small ones, deliberately spaced about 1 mile apart from one another so that no-one need be too far from a mosque in order to pray there several times per day. The first electrically amplified call to prayer is made in these mosques at about 5:10 am each day.















The lifestyle is relaxing, low-stress and good for those with young children.
It’s true you can join in the local exploitation of cheap foreign labour and have a Filipino or Indonesian maid do your washing and ironing (though she may scrub the dishes with her bare hands) for $7 per hour. Some people may wonder at the ethics of doing so. The question of what to do with the time gained from this externalisation of domestic labour remains. The need for diversion of a young child will be well satisfied by repeated visits to the shops, a tatty private club, the other tatty private club, or a friend’s house.

A $10,000 loan is available for a car.
There is no public transport, and car importation by private individuals is prohibited with few exceptions, so it’s buy a car with your own capital, take out the loan, or have nothing. Every second-hand dealer knows of the $10,000 loan and the used-car market is priced accordingly. The automotive market in Brunei is, like all money-making enterprises in Brunei, a closed one, with a small number of dealers operating under license from the Sultan. Imports of both new and second-hand vehicles are overpriced or, if reasonably priced, illegal. This policy has resulted in the retention in Brunei of thousands of cars that are so old and overworked as to be dangerous. At the same time, brand-new cars may be purchased easily by Muslims through interest-free loans provided by Islamic banks. Purchase prices thus have less meaning in Brunei than they might in a productive economy. When the bank willingly underwrites personal loans that are almost certain to become ‘non-performing’, a high purchase price is primarily a source of status to the borrower. For all these reasons, expect to pay about 30% more than an open market would say your 1994 Toyota Corolla is worth. There are many small repair shops in Brunei, perhaps reflecting the great age of the national stock. Repairs to older vehicles are cheap but they often fail. However, repairs are cheap. But they often fail.

If Brunei were a designer perfume

If Brunei were a designer perfume it would have the freshness of lime and the boldness of chloroform.