Column | The Greenkeeper Writes
Published on April 22, 2020The Day After Part 4: Hamsah
All they want us to do is cut, thought Hamsah. That sounded easy enough. “Cut, cut, cut, that’s all we’re going to do this week.” Chong had told the staff three days ago when they first started work after the long MCO ended “and after that, we cut again”.
Yes, I got the idea. The grass continued to grow during the many weeks of lockdown and now all we have to do is cut them down to the height we want them.
“Remember, we cut high, then we reduce the cutting height bit by bit.”
Hamsah was there, among Chong’s team that maintains the 18-hole South Course. It was a mixed team of local Malaysians and foreigners.
“How tall should we start?” a young Malaysian in the team asked. These Malaysians don’t last, mused Hamsah. They keep joining and then leaving the team. Probably better opportunities elsewhere he supposed, otherwise why leave a good job? It is indeed a good job under Roslan, Chong and Balan.
He could understand when the Malaysians were a high turnover under the previous management; they treated the Malaysians just like they treated us foreigners, but now they treated the foreigners well and they treated the Malaysians the same way too. Maybe they expected more.
“Start double” replied Chong “If previously it was 12mm, adjust your current height to 24mm, if it used to be 25mm, start at 50mm. If 50mm, make it 100mm” Chong replied to the new worker.
“100mm? Four inches? Waduh! That would be like cutting air,” Hamsah interrupted Chong. The other workers laughed.
“Let it be,” Chong said in what he thought was a good Indonesian slang. It never failed to amuse Hamsah and his fellow Indonesians when Malaysians think they spoke good Indonesian language “If you really are cutting air, reduce it by 10% to 90mm. If still cutting air, reduce it another 10% to 80mm. As long as you are cutting the top of the grass, continue mowing. The day after, we will reduce the height again and cut again.”
Hamsah raised his hand to get Chong’s attention again “After so long without food, are we not going to fertilise the grass?”
“Fertiliser is not food for the grass bro,” said Chong patiently using a familiar Indonesian pronoun. “As long as there is sunlight, the grass will make their own food by photosynthesis. It is one of the reasons we don’t cut too many leaves so soon because if there were no leaves, the grass cannot do photosynthesis.”
Hamsah understood that because since Roslan came into the picture, he organised weekly briefings for the staff and he tried to teach them a little bit every week. Hamsah knew it was hard to think of fertiliser as vitamins for grass instead of food because if not applied, the grass turned yellow rather quickly. Plus the staff always refer to fertiliser as ‘food’ for the grass and trees anyway.
That was three days ago. Today as Hamsah was mowing the fairways at an incredible 20mm height, he could see Chong standing there, monitoring the work. Despite mowing almost double the original height of 12.5mm, there were still a lot of clippings on the fairway behind Hamsah’s machine and there was a group of staff sweeping them up behind him.
If left there the clippings may create bumps on an otherwise smooth field and hide the grass underneath from sunlight, necessary for photosynthesis. Hamsah was familiar with the concept of photosynthesis, it’s not like he didn’t learn it in school. He and a lot of his compatriots came to Malaysia because there were vacancies in jobs that Malaysians don’t want, not because he – they – were stupid. If anyone was stupid, it was the Malaysian workers and the Malaysian bosses. The workers were treated like unwashed, stupid labourers under the previous boss; even he was an unwashed, stupid labourer who operated a RM250,000 machinery cutting RM600,000 worth of imported grass on an RM20 million ringgit golf course for customers who paid tens of thousands of ringgit to become members of the club that spent hundreds of thousands of ringgit a month to maintain. Don’t the bosses ever see the irony?
Contrary to popular belief, the Malaysians were not lazy or spoilt. Sure, there were some who were, but the majority he worked with were hardworking and sincere. They mostly just couldn’t take the disrespect shown to them. In other words, they were treated like foreign workers. Hamsah smiled to himself thinking about it. The members, management and in fact Malaysians, in general, treated foreign workers like second-class humans and yet couldn’t survive without them. The toilet and rest facilities provided to them were so dirty, Hamsah and his friends used the toilets at the halfway huts or the clubhouse and rested in the field.
Their salary was supposed to be the same as the cleaners who swept the floor in the air-conditioned offices and changing rooms. How many golfers had promised to come again because the changing room was clean? How many customers had they lost because of dirty floors? Wouldn’t it make more sense to pay the field workers a grade higher than the office staff? Or a hardship allowance perhaps for the responsibility? Had anyone killed the floor using the wrong amount of soap?
He and the other foreigners could take it because they had invested a lot and expected to gain more when they came here. He was amused to listen to stories told to him by a Malaysian worker who had worked in another country and was telling him how he was treated. It actually was no different than how Malaysians treated their foreign workers.
Hamsah believed that if the management were to spend a little more and get workers who had invested in training for life under the sun as an agriculturalist or landscaper and treated them as they would like to be treated, it could work; maybe more Malaysians could fill these jobs.
Just like Nina, yes sweet ‘innocent’ Nina. There used to be two clerks, one was the purchasing cum store clerk and one clerk to do the office work for Roslan and both clerks could not finish their work in time, always busy. When Nina came, she did the work of two clerks with ease, with plenty of time to flirt.
Who really was Nina? He knew many of the Malaysians were trying to score points with her. She may look and sound innocent, but Hamsah believed there was more to Nina than met the eye. And he doesn’t mean physically because there definitely was more to that, he smiled mischievously, but who is or was Nina, really? Last month, he saw her being dropped off by a big car around the corner from the club. She slammed the car door and actually walked almost five hundred meters to the club entrance.
Who was the driver of that car?
Who was Nina?
