A Funny Homeschooling Story
From Malaysia

You must read Vimala Devi Kumaraweh's funny homeschooling story from Malaysia. It is the most hilarious homeschooling story I have ever read in my entire life. It is a very long story but don't miss it for anything!

Here is Vimala's Story in Her Own Words!

We moved to a small town called Taiping, which was famous for its beautiful hills, fresh air, cool weather, low cost of living and low crime rate. We were rudely disabused of the last notion within a short period of time, although the criminal activities were not conducted by humans.

We bought an old bungalow with a large piece of land at a dirt cheap price - RM 135,000 which comes to less than USD $45,000.

Little did we know what we were in for, though! We never dreamed that the word quiet and peaceful were the last words to be associated with Taiping.

We were all so excited. As the house was dilapidated, we had to do some extensive renovations. Part of that renovation included a large brick wall around our compound which our elderly neighbours, who thought we were snubbing them, promptly referred to in sneering tones as the Great Wall of China. The imposing wall was actually to keep our two huge monsters, a snarling pitch black German Shepherd and an enormous drooling Neapolitan Mastiff, which pisses in fear whenever a stranger touches her, in our compound, and not running around and shortening the lives of our neighbours. My husband is a great fan of everything that is huge and ugly as he is just the opposite.

He and I actually used to share our rickety bed with the two beasts until our first child was born. Don't get me wrong. I love dogs but the German Shepherd almost mistook my fingers for delicious sausages the first time she met me. My husband says she looks feminine but I think he badly needs to see a psychiatrist.

Anyway, my dogs and I are the best of friends now. They are sweet and adorable in their own way. And most important of all, they obey me without a moment's hesitation, as you will soon learn below.

We began homeschooling in earnest and everything seemed perfect. Our children seemed to have descended directly from heaven and had the temperaments of angels and brains as fast as Lamborghinis. I was in homeschooling heaven!

Our adventures began with a crash one night in October 2008. I awoke with a start at around the time serial killers would be at their maniacal busiest. I thought I heard something shatter. My heart fluttered and almost flew out of my gaping mouth. I shook my husband awake and babbled incoherently at him.

He brought out his long, fat bamboo stick from under our bed and got ready to barge his way outside. My husband thinks he is Clint Eastwood although he is only 5 feet 6 inches tall and built like a broomstick. I clutched him hysterically and told him to stay inside. Nasty visions of him lying in a pool of blood with his severed head grinning at me kept floating in my terrified mind.

He changed tack and told me that he would creep out by the back door. I relented because the dogs were in the backyard. In a short while he called me to come outside. I was shivering but I managed to walk out without collapsing in a dead faint.

There, in our backyard, a family of monkeys was having what seemed to be a tea party. The Queen of England wouldn't have wanted to join them, as the party was a bit wild. Several broken roof tiles were on the floor. I looked up at our roof and saw a particularly cheeky monkey leering at me with a roof tile in one hand and a Maths book in the other.

My two treacherous dogs, lying on their backs and with their legs lifted high up in the air as if they were flagpoles, were snoring peacefully. I was irate. I slapped my two giants awake and made them chase the pesky primates away.

A week later, while I was teaching my kids science, my dogs began to bark their heads off. And then, suddenly, everything went silent. I rushed outside. A sorry-looking civet cat was hanging from the jaws of my German Shepherd. I was horrified. Fearing the worst, I shrieked to my dog to drop the poor creature. She did so immediately. The civet cat sprang to life, scampered over the Great Wall of China and disappeared from our lives forever.

Everything went downhill after that. For the next few years, we became unwilling hosts to all sorts of hairy, scaled, feathered and bald guests. National Geographic photographers would have been better off camping in our backyard than recklessly risking their necks in the thick jungles of the Amazon or the savage savannahs of Africa.

I have to admit that we did see some spectacularly beautiful creatures. I don't mind the feathered ones. We have watched spellbound a magnificent hornbill in full flight. We have gazed dreamily at an owl that seemed to have taken up residence at the top of a streetlight that happened to be planted in my front lawn. And we have stared open-jawed at flocks of brightly coloured kingfishers fishing for what else but fish in the huge monsoon drain that ran behind our house.

Count Dracula would have been envious of us. If the lovely feathered ones were in full twittering flight during the daytime, our winged mammalian cousins outdid them when the moon came up. Yes, bats. Lots of them. A bat hater's nightmare. Luckily, bats don't bother me.

Malaysian bats, unlike their South American cousins, don't have the unnerving habit of latching on to you and sucking you dry when you least expect it. That much I can say on their behalf. But our BELOVED BRAND NEW CAR (Yes, I am screaming!) takes the brunt of of this burgeoning bat infestation - it is always full of bat guano every morning. We would have been richer than Bill Gates if bat dung had been gold!

I'm not finished yet. Let's move on from our aerial friends to our terrestrial friends, the monitor lizards. The Malaysian monitor lizard has a cousin, the Komodo Dragon, which wreaks havoc in Indonesia. The Komodo Dragon, like the Tyrannosaurus Rex, has one devastating weapon - its teeth. Its teeth are so full of horribly vicious bacteria that not only are they a dentist's worst nightmare, they are horrid enough to make anyone run screaming from its vicinity.

For once you are bitten, or even if its teeth only grazes you, you can run, but just as surely as day turns to night, you will die. The Komodo Dragon, aptly named, will seek out your bacteria-infested corpse at its leisure a few hours later and lunch on it.

The Malaysian monitor lizard, on the other hand, does not eye humans as meat but it has a tail like a lion tamer's whip that can draw blood even when you are wearing jeans. I have seen that with my own eyes when I called the local firefighters to catch one gigantic lizard that was hiding under my raised dog kennel. After a vicious battle with the huge monitor lizard, one firefighter proudly showed me the bleeding battle wounds on his legs. That particular lizard was so big that it is now a permanent resident of the Taiping Zoo. Who says I don't donate to good causes?

The monsoon drain behind our house, besides being a hunting ground for kingfishers and herons, is also a swimming pool for monitor lizards. We can often hear them splashing around and wrestling in it.

Our garden has even been the playground of an animal on the endangered species list, the pangolin. One entered our house one night. Only God knows how it climbed over the Great Wall of China. My dogs chased it throughout the night. We slept through the whole ruckus, not suspecting anything.

We woke up the next morning to find the poor creature entrenched in a hole it had dug. Luckily my dogs had not been able to put even a dent on the pangolin, a creature that was the animal version of a battle tank. It has body armour that could fracture your toes if you gave it one strong kick. The firefighters had their work cut out for them when we called them.

Monkeys, owls, bats, herons, monitor lizards, pangolin - they are just innocent animals, most people would say. Try telling that to an Indian farmer who has to occasionally flee from a rampaging elephant that just wants to cave his head in with one massive step of its battering ram for a foot. Or an African tribe that has to run helter-skelter from a pack of cackling hyenas that just wants to gnaw on their bones. Or a native of the Amazon who is being embraced by an ambitious anaconda.

Talking about being in the clutches of constrictors, there can't be an unluckier man in the world than this Malaysian man whose true story I am going to tell you next. If you think that the longest snake in the world is the anaconda, think again. That dubious honour goes to the reticulated python, a denizen of Malaysia. If you are not shivering yet, you should be!

The man I alluded to above was just about to get married to his sweetheart. In actual fact, and I have the newspaper to prove it to you, he was going to get married the next day. Unluckily for him the night before his marriage, perhaps he was getting the pre-marital jitters, he had a strong need to go to the bathroom. Which bridegroom doesn't, anyway?

However, unlike any sane human who would have used the modern technological marvel called the Toilet, for Goodness Sakes, he answered the call of nature along some village path. A particularly hungry reticulated python happened to be there waiting for its next meal.

He was found the next morning by the villagers with his head and shoulders deep in the body of the snake. I can't think of a more horrible way to die than to be trapped in the coils of a python and then slowly being crushed to death. Perhaps an attack by piranhas? Or being torn apart by a pack of savage werewolves?

So you will excuse me if I become HYSTERICAL whenever I spot a snake in my house! Yes, snakes do drop in once in a while. The first one happened while I was watching, with a tissue paper clutched in one hand, an especially engrossing Oprah Winfrey episode on gambling husbands.

I looked up during the commercial break. There was a colourful rope hanging from a wall light. I stood on the sofa and attempted to bring the rope down. But my Guardian Angel must have been on duty that day - before I could touch the rope, it wriggled. I leapt out of the couch and landed ten feet away. I ran to the bedroom, locked it and lay on the bed almost comatose. My blood, along with my feet, had frozen.

My broomstick husband, who also fancied himself as an intrepid zoologist, dashed to our library, grabbed his book on Southeast Asian snakes and dashed back to study his slithering sensation. He was awed by the colourful rings of the little snake. With his bony nose in the book, he flipped through the pages trying to identify my nemesis. He wanted to find out if it was venomous. He had the suicidal desire to pick it up if the book said it wasn't. After 10 minutes of rifling through the pages he gave up in disgust and called the local fire department.

Other snakes, some splashed with bright colours like a baby's storybook and others just plain brown or black like old discarded belts, have attempted to make our home their home too. There was a time when we used to see snake skins all over our house. There was a whole month when a green coloured snake, danger level unknown, did guard duty on our front gate. There was also a time when our letterbox became a cosy little nest for a mother snake. I opened the letterbox once and found a clutch of snake eggs inside. You wouldn't want to know my reaction.

You may love babies but you will never want to cuddle up with a baby that crawled out from under my car 2 years ago. It was a baby cobra less than a foot long but enough to send a whole household to the morgue. I threw a fit and danced my way back into the house. My husband and kids were not at home at that time. I called my husband and told him not to come back until the snake was caught.

The fire engine roared in, with blazing lights and blaring sirens, enough to scare the living daylights out of any steroid-filled chest-pounding macho beast, let alone a baby. Our terrified infant did a Houdini act and was never seen again. Whether it is living in our storeroom or is coiled up somewhere in a hole in our garden, waiting to grow into a 20 foot monster, I shudder to imagine.

So that is how my kids and I spend our homeschooling days, or some of it anyway. I fervently hope they will become Einsteins or Beethovens. However, by the exposure they are getting, it is more likely that they will be following the footsteps of Austin Stevens or the belated Steve Irwin and become hosts for a Malaysian wildlife program, not that I am actively encouraging them.

Please don't judge me if you are a city slicker. Animals aren't that bad if you live in a skyscraper in the middle of a concrete jungle and the worst animal you see is a shifty-eyed rodent whose only evil intention is to rob you of your last week's mouldy pizza which is rotting in your garbage bag among other delicious wonders.

I love animals, I really do - gambolling deer, furry rabbits, huggable pandas, prancing ponies, frisky Dalmations - creatures that you can safely play with and come back home with all your body parts intact. I am not too keen on the wild, vicious ones that could rip out your entrails and feed on your still-beating heart as you scream in agony.

So am I returning to the city? Never in a million years! I love being a park warden of my own garden!

Kris, Our Editor, Replies

Vimala, there is nothing in the world like your funny homeschooling story! I have never read anything like it! It is so strange and amazing that it is almost unbelievable.

However, I believe you.

I wish I had been there with you and your kids when you encountered the "beasts". You must be risking your lives very often, but homeschooling life in your home is full of excitement.

I hope you and your family live to a ripe old age.

Good luck and happy homeschooling.

P.S. I am itching to ask you - have you met a reticulated python yet? If you have, please tell us about it.

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