IBAN farmer Gelanggang Lipa became emotional when he saw two officers from the Malaysian Pepper Board coming to visit him at his isolated farm deep in the hinterland of Betong, Sarawak.

The 75-year-old said never in his wildest dream he thought he would be seeing any officer from any government agency take the pain to go into the jungle to find out how they could help him.

Betong is a market town some 200km from Kuching and Gelanggang’s longhouse, Rumah Tayan at Penebak Nanga in Ulu Layar, is a 40-minute drive from the Pepper Board office in Simpang Layar. His farm is another 15-20 minutes from the longhouse.

Gelanggang’s challenge to life started 40 years ago after a hunting mishap. When out looking for meat with a friend, his shotgun misfired.

Believing the cartridge was faulty, Gelanggang rested the front end of the gun’s barrel on his left foot, so as not to get it dirty, while he attempted to eject the cartridge.

It was a grave mistake. The gun unexpectedly went off, blowing the whole of his left foot off.

“I thought I was going to die there (from excessive bleeding),” Gelanggang told The Malaysian Insight who had accompanied the Pepper Board officers.

He spent 10 agonising hours in excruciating pain in the dark forest before rescuers finally got him to hospital.

Although he was a man of slight build, his hunting partner decided that he did not have the strength to carry Gelanggang for the one-hour walk out of the forest back to the longhouse. So he was left there and had to wait for more than two hours for help to come.

“I was drifting in and out of consciousness. The pain was excruciating,” he said.

“It was the same when they carried me out on a make-shift stretcher.”

When Gelanggang finally reached Sri Aman Hospital, 78km away, it was 3am.

“When the doctors saw my foot, they told me it could not be saved,” said Gelanggang.

“The buckshot had shattered every bone in the foot.

“When I was told my foot would have to be amputated, I felt my whole world had caved in. I asked myself what I could do now.”

After spending a couple of months in hospital, he was discharged only to hobble back home to taunts that he was no longer a man who could hunt nor work his farm – normal things men in rural Sarawak have to do to survive.

Sheer grit and hard work

Gelanggang, before the accident, had started planting pepper in one corner of his farm and while he was laid up in hospital, his 71-year-old wife, Duai Saga, was tending it.

“They taunted me that I could never expand my pepper farm,” he recalled.

The taunts instead had the opposite effect.

It gave him the drive to want to silence his detractors.

Through sheer grit, determination and hard work, Gelanggang set about it the moment he was given his prosthetic foot.

The walk to his pepper patch is a challenging walk even for an able-bodied man.

It is a steady climb up a hill with the final five-minute ascent up to a 3-4% gradient.

That did not deter Gelanggang.

Over the years, he cleared more land to expand his pepper patch with the help of his son-in-law, who helped carry the heavy belian poles to the cleared land while his wife helped with the planting of more vines.

Today, Gelanggang has more than 600 vines, as good as any man in his longhouse.

His 400 newly planted vines had made him eligible for a RM9,200 subsidy. This includes monetary incentives and subsidies for the purchase of belian poles, pepper cuttings, fertilisers and soil treatment chemicals.

‘Uncomfortable and very painful’

This gritty farmer’s fight, however, is not over.

He is now in a “war” with the welfare department over his promised prosthetic foot.

“They promised me a new one some time back. But every time I went to the welfare office to inquire about it, they only had two words for me – ‘belum lagi’ (not yet),” he said.

“I don’t have the time to waste to make that long trip to Betong, only to be told those two words.”

Gelanggang remembered he had to spend “a lot of money” when he was asked to go to Kuching for his first foot replacement.

He said it was a waste of “good money” because the replacement was “useless”.

“It was uncomfortable and very painful,” he said.

Gelanggang said there was a screw, which made it even more cumbersome to use.

The one that he has now looks like a plastic tube attached to the sole of a cowboy boot.

It is so worn out that Gelanggang had to use duct tape to keep the tube and sole together.

There is, however, one good thing about his present prosthesis.

“They tell me that this plastic is fireproof,” he said with a laugh.

He hoped his promised new prosthesis would be of better quality and comfortable to use. – July 1, 2023.