The school is in Sarawak’s rural Lawas Kecil district and the MCO meant that the students had to leave their hostel and go home to 13 different villages, many of them hard to reach.
Because of the MCO, residents could not leave the villages. However, exceptions were made for representatives to go out for food supplies for their communities. They would distribute the food using trucks.
Nazmi’s eureka moment came when he noticed one such truck. He thought he could get on the trucks to deliver schoolwork to students in all 13 villages.
He brought up the idea with community heads and began his homework deliveries almost immediately.
“It took me two full days to make trips to all 13 villages,” he told FMT.
He made his deliveries every week until schools in Sarawak reopened.
The entire process would take him almost the whole week.
Every Monday and Tuesday, he gathered learning materials from the other teachers, who were working remotely through Whatsapp, e-mail or Telegram.
“On Thursday, some of the school administrative staff who were living near the school and I would print everything out. We compiled and divided the schoolwork accordingly.
“On Friday, we delivered the homework to 52 houses in Kampung Long Sukang.
“We would go from house to house to explain the tasks to the children, but we were not allowed to sit too long with them, and they needed to wash their hands before seeing me.
“The day after, we did the same for the other 12 villages, with the help of the villagers for transportation.”
He said having to work as the liaison person between the students and the other teachers was especially challenging.
“It’s a long process because the children sometimes did not understand certain things and I would need to discuss this back and forth with the other subject teachers.”
And that’s not to mention the long hours on the road. Many times he found himself lost trying to look for remote villages.
Recalling the struggle of finding one such village, he said: “We had to travel on foot at one point, following a hand drawn map the villagers gave us. But it led us to a river. We managed to find it only on our fourth trip.”
He said all the sweat from the hours of driving, walking and sometimes hiking was well worth it when the students greeted him with wide smiles on their faces.
“For kids in rural schools, the school and teachers are the only bridges between them and the outside world,” he said. “So when we did the homework deliveries, they were really excited to see us.”
During the first MCO, his was the only school that employed this method of teaching.
Since then, SK Long Sukang’s story has caught the education ministry’s attention and inspired many other rural schools in Malaysia.
As a result of his efforts, Cikgu Nazmi was given the Taylor’s College’s RISE Educator of the Year Award. RISE stands for “Remarkable Impact in Student Education for us”.
“We received a lot of thank-you notes through Whatsapp from many teachers and administrators because they now have an idea of how to help kids in rural and remote schools, native schools, and island schools in Sabah too,” said Nazmi, who now teaches in another school.
He added that he had never considered any of his hard work and commitment as charity.
“We do this because it is our responsibility as teachers. We are being paid for this every month. It’s not voluntary.
“Maybe in the city schools they can do online learning, but we simply cannot do that in a rural school.”
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