BETONG: Forty years ago, Gelanggang Lipa thought he was lost to this world when he literally shot himself in the foot in a hunting accident deep in the jungle of Betong, a rural town some 200km from Kuching.
Discharged from the hospital as a disabled, he thought he could not do "normal things" men in rural Sarawak had to do to survive — go fishing, hunting or work on a farm.
The world of this ethnic Iban from Rumah Tayan at Penebak Nanga in Ulu Layar went into a tailspin when his shotgun misfired.
Believing the cartridge was faulty, he rested the front end of the gun's barrel on his left foot while he attempted to eject the cartridge.
"I didn't want to get the barrel dirty or clogged with dirt."
It was a grave mistake. The gun unexpectedly went off, blasting the whole of his left foot off.
Getting out of the jungle at night to get treatment was not easy. Gelanggang, who was in his early 30s when the incident happened, said he had to spend some 10 agonising hours in excruciating pain in the dark forest before he was finally brought out and then rushed to the Sri Aman hospital 78km away — a two-hour-plus drive then.
Betong did not have a hospital 40 years ago.
"I thought I was going to bleed to death all alone there," Gelanggang, who is 75 today, said as he narrated the incident.
Even though he was a man of slight build, his hunting partner decided he did not have the strength to carry him for the roughly one-hour walk out of the forest back to the longhouse.
So, Gelanggang was left there on his own for several hours while his hunting partner rushed back to the longhouse for help.
While waiting, he said, he was drifting in and out of consciousness.
"The pain was excruciating."
When Gelanggang finally reached the Sri Aman hospital, it was 3am.
The news he feared most became a reality.
"After examining my foot, the doctors told me it could not be saved.
"They told me it has to be amputated. The buckshot had shattered every bone in the foot to little pieces.
"When I was told my foot would have to be amputated, I felt my whole world had caved in. I then asked myself what could I do now."
Gelanggang spent a couple of months in hospital and after he was discharged. He hobbled back home to a torrid of taunts and, behind his back, snide remarks.
"They labelled me half a man and questioned my ability to provide for my then young family."
Instead of wallowing in pity, he instead picked himself up and vowed to silence his doubters by showing that he was as good as any man in the longhouse, if not better, at looking after the welfare of his family — even with one foot.
Before the mishap, he had started planting pepper in one corner of his farm.
And while he was laid up in hospital, his 71-year-old wife Duai Saga was tending to it.
He said he remembered some of his kinfolk taunting him that he could never expand his pepper farm.
It gave him the drive to want to silence them.
He said after he was fitted with a prosthetic foot, he set about to expand his pepper farm.
Like most farms in Sarawak's rural areas, they are never too close to their longhouse, so it was quite a walk to get his pepper farm. The walk is, at best, a challenging one, even for an able-bodied man.
The jungle trail to the farm was undulating with a steady climb up a small hill ,and the gradient of the trail in the final five minutes a climb of three to four per cent.
For the unfit, the walk could take 15 to 20 minutes.
Gelanggang overcame those hurdles and over the subsequent years, with some help, he managed to clear more land to expand his pepper farm and get to where he is now.