EASON IN SARAWAK

This is an Englishwoman's impressions of life in the back country of Northern Borneo. Tall, thin, and mildly Victorian, Mrs. Dickson tells of a trip to Sarawak in 1957 when she and her husband were taken to remote villages where they saw the indigenous jungle peoples being prepared for eventual self- support and self-government. They saw truly communal living with young and old dependent on each other--""members of one another"". They became convinced that the young Dayak, for all his poverty, had a sense of his own place in the framework of living, and of the duties and importance of that place, which gave him a feeling a value which modern youth had lost. Believing that the Dayak youth and the British youth could learn from each other, the author and her husband played a major role in sending six young Englishmen to work in Sarawak, an experiment which was expanded into Volunteer Service Overseas, a forerunner of our Peace Corps.