aisyalam

Our first visit if the day was to the National Economic Action Council in Putrajaya, a formal session with Secretariat K. Govindan, where we learned about Malaysia’s economic planning and plans. A lot of facts and figures, and some sobering ones too. For instance, the average income here is less than $4000 a year; to put things in perspective, by 2020, the country hopes to be where Switzerland was in 1980. The big hope is that tourism dollars increase, and let me be the first to suggest to anyone a trip over here! Malaysia will tomorrow launch their new economic plan (the “9th plan”) which promises to be quite profound we were told (without details). We then headed off to Petaling Jaya to meet with the Sisters of Islam (http://www.sistersinislam.org.my), a great women’s advocacy group. In large part their work is to advise women who are victims of domestic abuse, but they also do other sorts of advocacy, circulate publications, and hold workshops. In this session we learned about the groups monogamy campaign, as well as some historical facts like that women didn’t start wearing hijab (the head scarf) here until the 1980s (which was a real shocker to me, since it is now so ubiquitous). I got the names of some “Islamic feminists,” who I look forward to reading at some point. A lot of complex issues at play in this culture, that’s for sure. We went to a really amazing Indian joint called Raju for lunch, then headed back to Putrajaya. Our afternoon meeting was a real high point, as the Minister of Foreign Affairs (Malaysia’s equivalent to Condelezza Rice), Datuk Seri Panglima Syed Hamid Albar, was able to meet with us, and spoke frankly and honestly about hot issues now faced by the country and ASEAN region (Myanmar mostly, but also some tussle with Singapore over the causeway). Because of the delicate nature of some of these issues, we were instructed not to report on what he said, a request I will honor. I will say that it was another extremely instructive session, a discussion of the type of things us visitors wanted to know.

The program is now nearly over. We will have one session at ISIS in the morning, and then the group will be shuttled off to Langkawi for a weekend of R&R. I don’t know whether or not I’ll have much to report before returning to my regular life on Monday. It has been a real treat to spend time with such great minds learning about some of the country’s infrastructure, and today I was able to write a couple of little poems, finally, which also brought satisfaction. More soon!