In the morning I went up the hill to Siti's (still not her real name) house to get our coffee. She greeted me, stepped inside, and re-emerged with her hair wrapped in a scarf. While we ate breakfast she told us that she is having some work done on the guest house by the "orang asli", the indigenous people of Malaysia, who until recently were hunters and gatherers (and still are to some extent). They are so few and powerless that I've never seen them mentioned specifically in the Malaysian demographic breakdown.

Her complaints were identical to those you almost invariably hear about hunter-gatherers partly assimilated into a wage economy anywhere in the world: "As soon as you pay them, they stop working and don't come back until the money is spent."

When we mentioned the dawn chorus, Siti looked pained and said that she had asked the man to lower his voice, but he became aggressive: "Keluar. Saya akan tumbuk awak." (Get out. I'm going to punch you).

Talking about her daughter's death from lupus prompted some bitter reflections on the medical profession. Siti recommends the government hospital rather than a private hospital. A foreigner went to a private hospital with a mild chest pain and the specialists fought over him for a month until they killed him.