ECM LIBRA executive chairman Datuk Kalimullah Hassan met up with the Catholic Nun while in Sabah recently.
What drives people like Sister Dorothy Amelia Laudi, who has two Masters and a Bachelor’s degree in early education and child psychology, to give up her job as a lecturer.
And devote her whole life, as she says, to “begging” so she can help educate the poorest of Sabahans in the deep interiors of the state?
Sister Dorothy runs six kindergartens in Tambunan, Pensiangan, Kota Marudu and Keningau for the poor – and there are many, as the rural folk, she says, “know how to make children” – but most parents cannot afford the RM50 annual fee.
In her schools, she hires 12 locals who have some basic education and training, to teach the kids, gives them a meal everyday at 10am which probably lasts the whole day, but many have gone on to secondary school and a few to university.
That’s the great part.
It’s a challenge though, as most of these villages have no electricity; water is pumped from rivers; and the kindergartens are built by the villagers themselves with materials sourced from the jungle or from donors.
Sister Dorothy has a wicked sense of humor.
“My colleague Lim Beng Choon and I felt embarrassed having asked her to meet us at our hotel in Kota Kinabalu.”
“It took her 6 hours traversing rivers, taking public transport and taxis to reach us, ” Kalimullah said in a posting on the social media.
We took her for breakfast and she scraped every morsel of her wan tan mee “so I won’t be hungry going back.”
“We were told about Sister Dorothy by Dato Ong Eng Bin, a retired banker and my fellow Governor in Methodist Boys School, our alma mater, last year. It took us almost a year to synchronize the visit with her,” he added.
She funds the operations with money from individual donors and once in a while, from institutions.
Kalimullah said if Malaysia needs to look for heroes, we don’t have to look far.
There are many like Sister Dorothy in both the peninsula and Sabah and Sarawak.
“The ECM Libra Foundation has been working with some of them for the last 20 years, Kalimullah added.
“God bless them,” he said.
