The Pioneers

The wooden building, which has obviously seen better days, is as old as the Federal Land Development Authority (Felda) itself. It houses the office of Mohd Imra Mohd Pinni, manager of Felda Lurah Bilut in Bentong, Pahang - the very first of the agency's schemes in the country.
The structure could easily be mistaken for a Klinik Desa although most of such village clinics in Pahang are now pink-coloured double-storey structures.
Outside, the walls can definitely use a fresh coat of paint - even if the only choice is pink. And someone should get rid of that artifact from a different era - the three red buckets (stenciled "API") of sand hanging from a wooden stand, which were virtually the extent of firefighting equipment in many government buildings. Maybe not. They are reminders of simpler times.
Indeed, the office is today almost a museum with its old equipment, photographs and documents all kept in mint condition. Time does seem to have stood still for it - which in contrast is certainly not the case with the scheme that it oversees.
Significant progress and development has been achieved by the 45-year-old scheme, the signs of which include a secondary school - a concrete building erected 31 years ago - in front of the office. There is also a row of shophouses and the Petronas station owned by the scheme's cooperative, while nearby a mosque and two temples - one Chinese and the other Hindu - reflect the multi-racial composition of the scheme's participants.
A number of the pioneer settlers and their children are now also proud owners of sprawling bungalow houses, which are a far cry from their first homes when they arrived at the257ha scheme in August and September 1959.
That batch of 400 settlers in the first of Felda's 276 schemes to date were selected from different parts of the peninsula. They came without their families and were put up in long houses.
The road leading to the scheme is now asphalt-paved and well-maintained, no more need for Land Rovers and wagons pulled by tractors, like when Kamaruddin Mat Doaa first arrived.
The scheme's 65-year-old village head remembers well the day he reported as a settler to the office. He had travelled the whole day from his village in Sungai Manek, Telok Anson (now Teluk Intan).
"Nak hidup susah masa tu. Nak makan pun seksa (Life was tough then, even getting enough to eat was hard)," he says, of his early days at the scheme.
"We had to clear the land by hand. And we gotong royong (work together) to put up the living quarters so that we could bring our families to join us."
Kamaruddin was 20 and unemployed when he received a letter, dated Sept 17 1959, informing him that he was successful in his application to become a settler in the Lurah Bilut Land Development programme.
He was asked to report to the new settlement in 12 days, together with 29 other successful applicants from Telok Anson.
Specifically, they were all told not to bring their families until later.
Kamaruddin had not informed his parents, or his fiancee Halijah Montak - then only 14 - of his application or the interview he attended with the Settlers' Selection Committee. He continued to keep them in the dark even after finding out he had been accepted and would soon be leaving the kampung.
"The interview was easy. The panel asked me two questions: whether I could swim and if I could handle an axe. I said yes to both and that was it".
And so among the bare necessities that he was to bring on the journey, he made a point to pack an axe. There was one luxury he allowed himself though: a gambus, the traditional string musical instrument.
"That day, I left the house when my father was performing the Subuh prayers. I didn't want him to know, but he found out somehow and he was there at the train station to see me off," he says.
Kamaruddin and the rest of the group took the train from Telok Anson to Tanjung Malim where they transferred to a bus for the remaining journey that took the rest of the day.
"I had never gone out of Telok Anson before. The others too. It was a very winding road and by the time we arrived in Bentong, we were all sick. Then there was the ride in Land Rovers and wagons into Lurah Bilut."
Launched on Jan 1, 1958, Lurah Bilut was initially managed by the Lurah Bilut Land Development Corporation, which was formed by Felda.
The corporation provided all necessary agricultural equipment to the settlers. It also supplied the building materials for the settlers to build their own houses.
Only when the houses were completed, did the families join them.
Each settler was allocated a little over 10 acres of land - seven to be planted with rubber trees, three for an orchard, and 0.25 for the house.
The records show that Ahmad Hussin, born in Pasir Mas in Kelantan in 1901, was the first settler in the scheme. He arrived at Lurah Bilut on Aug 2, 1959. He died on Feb 10, 1984. Of the 400 pioneer settlers, 60 who are still living.
Today, Lurah Bilut hosts 616 families comprising first, second and third generation settlers - 400 Malays, 169 Chinese and 47 Indians.
When the scheme was first launched, conditions for participation were quite straight-forward: the applicant must be a Malayan between 21 and 50 years of age; does not own land of bigger than two acres; belongs to a big family; is physically fit; and has no criminal record.
Even then, "peraturan tak ketat (procedures were not strict)," Kamaruddin recalls, as he got into the scheme without meeting some of the criteria.
Of the 29 that came from Telok Anson with him, 14 dropped out within weeks and returned home because they found it too tough.
Kamaruddin did return to his kampung - two years later. To get married.
"Actually it was a requirement to be married and that the family must join you. I was only engaged when I came here. The scheme officials were starting to ask a lot of questions as to why my wife had not joined me. So I returned home to get married."
Kamaruddin and Halijah never had their honeymoon. "The henna on my wife's fingers were still red when she joined me to work the land," he says, with a little laugh.
Rubber trees take seven years to mature and there was a lot of work to be done, especially to protect the seedlings from mice. Felda paid each family $2.90 a day until the rubber trees could be tapped.
"It was all an experiment. We were the first, we didn't have anything to go by, all trial and error. The officials were also only former military personnel, not agriculturists."
And the settlement was heavily guarded as it was at the height of the communist insurgency at the time. Curfews were imposed as well.
"You know the buku tiga lima (the `555 notebook')? We bought groceries on credit. There were two cooperatives. You'd see a stack of the buku tiga lima on the counter."
Sugar was 35 sen a kati, flour 25 sen a kati and rice RM1.60 a gantang, Kamaruddin says.
Basic amenities like piped water and electricity came much later. Water was piped into the scheme in 1960 but only to a roadside tap to be shared by several households.
"You'd see reels of hose linking the main pipe to the houses. You get quarrels among families, all fighting for water." It was only in 1964 that water was finally piped into individual homes.
Electricity? Its 24-hour supply came only in 1981.
"We could have gotten electricity earlier but we rejected the proposed 12-hour supply. Why should we settled for that?
"Yes, life was tough, but we had some fun too. For example, the gambus was put to good use in the evenings."
His father was a bandleader, and at Lurah Bilut, Kamaruddin and other musically inclined settlers set up a band called Sri Melor.
"Zaman pop yeh, yeh (pop yeh, yeh era) ... we would perform in small villages. Whenever the late Sultan Abu Bakar visited us and nearby villages, we were asked to perform," he recalls. Kamaruddin also plays the accordion in the band.
Regrets?
"None," Kamaruddin says, adding that he never once considered giving up and going back to his kampung.
"Life in my own kampung was also difficult. At the end of the day, at least I can proudly say the land that I worked on with my bare hands is mine. My most satisfying moment was when I was given the title to the land in the 1980s," he says.
Maybe one.
None of Kamaruddin's four children, born two years apart, has stayed to work on the land with him. Daughter Azizah, 43, is a housewife now living in Cheras, Kuala Lumpur, while sons Roslan, a Universiti Malaya graduate, Rosli and Rosdzi are an assistant headmaster, a policeman and a film production company staff respectively.
Kamaruddin and Halijah have 10 grandchildren, and "none of them also wants to take over from me".
Imra, the scheme's manager, can understand the children's decision. The 15th manager of Felda Lurah Bilut since its establishment, which included two Caucasians and one Chinese - is himself a Felda settler's son.
He was in Standard One in 1965 when his father moved the family from Kelang to Felda Suharto in Tanjung Malim, Perak.
Today, none of his brothers and sisters is interested in managing the family plot, he says. "We hire other people to work the land. We saw for ourselves how difficult it was for my father."
Imra says it's hard for the first generation settlers in that "on the one hand, they want their children to take over but on the other, they don't want them to suffer the way they did".
"They went through such hardship to make a living, they don't want their children to go through the same thing."
These days, Kamaruddin's originally allocated three acres of orchards are planted with oil palm, which takes only three years before the fruits can be harvested.
Most settlers also no longer do the harvesting themselves. The work is contracted out.
"They've become more like landowners," Imra explains.
A kg of rubber (dry form) is currently priced at RM4.82, and latex at RM1.70 a kg. "It's 60:40 - 60 per cent to the contract workers and 40 per cent to the landowner. They (the settlers) come and collect their share from the office."
"Harus pada adat (inevitable), they (the children) will not come back," Kamaruddin says.