KELANTAN: An Outsider's View

PART 3: YOU AND I… WE ARE THE SAME

Orientation week started annoyingly by us having to get up at 5 for subuh… I mean honestly…. Who get’s up at FIVE?! But I was a first year then, so who was I to complain. I think I better not get into too much detail bout the orientation week. Might kena AUKU for nothing, and there’s nothing funny bout thatJ

Anyway, I attended the first few days of orientation with a few frens I had from matrics. I was particularly close to Aza who was close to Marcell. The three of us were like a gang la- so to speak. However, there came a day when we were divided into our academic tutor group. It was then that I was forced to make new friends as me, Aza and Marcell got separated. I was waiting for the right moment to talk to the girl beside me when to my surprise, she talked to me first. She introduced herself to me- Siti Nurul Aini. And to spice things up a little- she is a Kelantanese! Not that I anti Kelantan people, just that I didn’t think that I could click with a Kelantanese so well. I had Kelantanese friends before but they were very quite and soft spoken. Aini (or Ti as I soon called her) was very talkative and made me feel so at home. She never failed to see that I was doing fine, knowing that I was a bit uncomfortable being in an environment different from home. She then introduced me to her friends and I soon found myself making lots and lots of friends.

The thing that amazed me this time was that half of the medical- dental intake (known as MEDDEN in USM) were Kelantanese. And here we are always hearing that Kelantanese are weird, kampong people. (please excuse the choice of words). But it clearly doesn’t look so from where I stand. These people have successfully invaded the medical field. And its not an easy field to throttle upon. Amazing and unheard of…

Back to Ti… I tried to restrain myself, but I couldn’t help it. I just had to ask her: why is Kelantan famous for its yellowish water. Actually I didn’t think she would know, but she did. She said that the water pipes were rusty… that’s why its yellow. The processed water is clear, it turns yellow as it reaches its users via the pipes as the pipes hasn’t been changed for a while. There are those who enjoy clear water cause they use water pumped out from a well outside their houses…I was like- ‘WELL water??!!, What the…! I never knew there were still people who used well water in the city.’ But Ti said that its normal over here. U either have yellow processed water or clear unprocessed water.

Then we went on talking bout other stuff like our interests and background. We saw eye to eye in a lot of things. It was really nice to have an intelligent conversation like we were having. It was then that I got the next shocker- Ti’s dad was a PAS member. Never in my life that I would think would I actually have a conversation with a PAS supporter. And I actually enjoyed the conversation. I always thought that the opposition supporters were all rebels. Fighting the government for nothing. But here I am casually talking to one of them. And I thought to myself… ‘So they are just like you and me’…


To be continued….

~LadY DarK~