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FIRE DRILL: WHAT TO DO

PART-TIME SALES ASSISTANT WANTED: BOOKWORM CORNER

FORT PELANDOK HERITAGE TRAIL

AIR QUALITY WARNING: API 156 (UNHEALTHY)

BOOKING CONFIRMED: ISLAND BOAT TOUR (REF. LT-4471)

FIRST AID: A SKILL FOR EVERYONE

Every year, thousands of accidents happen at home, on the road and at school, and in many of them the first few minutes decide what happens next. For the past five years, the first-aid team at SMK Bukit Indah (9) ______ more than two hundred students to help in an emergency.

The team's captain, Hana, (10) ______ afraid of blood, and she used to look away whenever a classmate cut a finger. Everything changed in March, when a boy fainted during assembly. By the time the teacher reached him, Hana (11) ______ already placed him in the recovery position and sent a friend to call the school nurse. Luckily, the boy (12) ______ go to hospital, because he had only missed breakfast.

Every Form 1 student (13) ______ the basic skills in a half-day course. The instructor, a retired nurse, tells the class that teamwork matters as much as skill: one person calls for help, another stays with the patient and a third fetches the first-aid box. "If more people (14) ______ what to do, fewer accidents would end badly," she says.

Hana is good at (15) ______ frightened people calm. Last term the instructor told the team (16) ______ a person with a neck injury unless there is danger. Not only (17) ______ first aid save lives, but it also gives young people confidence. A student with a minor cut should always have it (18) ______ by the school nurse.

THE TOWN THAT REFUSED TO BE FORGOTTEN

1 Walk down the main street of Teluk Rimba at seven in the morning and you will smell coffee roasting over charcoal. Shopkeepers lift wooden shutters, an old man sweeps the five-foot way in front of a shophouse whose tiles were laid in 1921, and a cat sleeps on the steps of the clock tower. Few of the visitors who arrive on the first bus know that, twenty years ago, this town was almost pulled down.

2 In the 1990s the tin mines closed and the young people left to find work in the cities. Shops were boarded up and roofs fell in. When the council announced a plan to replace the old shophouses with a car park and a shopping mall, a retired teacher named Mdm Rohani started a petition. Within a month, more than three thousand people had signed it. The plan was cancelled, because a group of engineers showed that the buildings, although old, were still strong enough to be repaired.

3 Saving the buildings was only the beginning. Residents set up a trust that gives small grants to owners on condition that they keep the original shutters and floor tiles. Several families who had moved away came back and opened cafes, a batik workshop and a small museum of tin mining. Today the town gives work to more people than it did in the mining days.

4 Visitors are not treated as an audience. The trust has trained forty teenagers as guides, and they take small groups through lanes where tourists can watch a blacksmith, a kite-maker and a noodle seller at work. Cars must be left at the edge of town. Visitors are asked not to enter private homes, and drones are not allowed.

5 Not everyone is happy, though. Some residents complain about weekend crowds and rising shop rents, and the trust has promised to limit tour buses to ten a day. Mdm Rohani, now seventy-three, says that the town has to listen to such complaints. "A heritage town is not a museum," she says. "It is a place where people live. If we forget that, there will be nothing left to protect."