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.