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FORMER Daily Express guest columnist-turned author, Tina Kisil, 59, hopes more Sabahans will write stories about their own families for posterity.On her part, she has penned a book entitled Footprints in the Paddy Fields.

Why footprints?

"I imagine all the footprints left by my ancestors in the paddy field.

As a child, I spent time in the paddy fields too. Like everyone else in the village, our (my siblings and I) lives centred around the cultivation of paddy.

"This involved spending endless days in the fields working with our hands and using the same tools our ancestors had used.

"In retrospect, we seemed to spend more time in the paddy fields than at home," said the retired teacher nostalgically.

Kisil, a mother of two, said she cannot just hope that someone will come along some day and write about the family's past.

"So this story is my small contribution towards preserving this slice of the past.

At least, descendants of my great grandfather (whom I wrote about) will have a legacy.

They will know something about the life of their ancestors in particular, and that of the Dusun people in general."

She is worried that some of the Dusun practices and customs, which were so important to the community's ancestors, will probably be buried with the passing of her mother's generation and lost forever.

Her concern is expressed in the Preface:

"As we join the race to modernise, we are in danger of discarding the very things which make the Dusuns unique simply because they have become irrelevant.

"The villagers used to resemble one big extended family, working side by side on each other's farms, helping to prepare new plots for cultivation, coming together at the passing of each soul, watching out for each other, and always sharing whatever they had.

"My parents taught me the importance of family and tradition."

Published by MPH Group Publishing in March this year, the 220-page book has 11 chapters and 2,000 copies have been printed for a start.

It is dedicated to her father, the late Edward Kisil, who had a huge influence on the children.

The senior Kisil was a policeman from Kuala Penyu, who joined the North Borneo Constabulary in Keningau. He served in various towns under the British North Borneo Chartered Company and was posted to Kota Belud before the Japanese Occupation Footprints in the Paddy Fields is both a family portrait and a childhood memoir - what it was like to be a child growing up in the 1950s and 1960s when Sabah was still known as British North Borneo.

"Initially, I wanted to write about my mother (Gamalid, now in her early eighties) because I thought she had a very interesting life.

She is a very interesting character. As I progressed, the book became a family portrait.

I wrote about the entire family, not just about my Mum," said the second child in a family of 12 siblings.

It is more than an attempt by Kisil to tell her children's generation about the "interesting life" she and her siblings had as kids growing up in the village. First, she talks about her difficult childhood "when paddy was a sign of wealth, when families and traditions were important, and when everybody lived in little bamboo houses on spindly timber stilts."

According to her, back then, kids were lulled to sleep by the grunts of pigs under the house or their mother's stories of clever animals and talking trees.

Basically, Kisil's story takes the reader back to the past into the homes of the Dusun Tindal people of Kg Kelawat, a small village near Kota Belud, "to learn about our culture and meet a few of our ancestors."

She continued: "It was a different world 'where one's prized possessions were makeshift farm tools and a buffalo or two, and where the dead were placed in stone burial jars'.

"Those were the days when removing human heads was a form of sport, and the only mode of transport was a pair of good legs."

Kisil feels that it is very sad because when our kids go to school, they learn a lot about great men and women.

"Movers and shakers but they (children) know very little or nothing about their own ancestors.

They also know a lot about our own leaders but don't know anything about their ancestry.

This, I think, is pitiful."

Through writing, her aim is to preserve some of the old Dusun beliefs and customs.

"I wrote a lot about the Dusun culture which is disappearing.

The Dusuns lived at a time when wealth was measured by the amount of rice a farmer harvested and a hard-working sumandak made a more alluring bride than her pretty sister.

"In bygone days, parents handed down their properties to both sons and daughters.

Paddy plots were valuable properties and used solely for rice cultivation.

"Gongs, earthenware jars and buffaloes were valued and bequeathed to the children.

Anyone guilty of causing the death of a farmer's buffalo had to replace it as well as pay a fine," she related in Footprints in the Paddy Fields.

According to Kisil, it was also obligatory for a groom to send a certain number of buffaloes to his bride's family as part of the dowry.

In Chapter One (Days of Yore), she said she has come across stories about the Dusun practice of keeping slaves. And it was her mother who confirmed the existence of the tudipon, as a slave was called.

"According to my mother, slaves were owned by the 'super rich' to do everything from working on the farm to emptying the master's chamber pot.

"The Dusun slaves could redeem themselves by working very hard and they could even accumulate wealth," she wrote.

Lamenting that paddy cultivation is disappearing, Kisil said: "We no longer grow paddy which is sad.

We just leave the paddy field fallow.

"My siblings and I always say that when we retire, we want to plant paddy but have yet to get down to doing it. We hope to do something."

Having dedicated 35 years of her prime life to teaching, Jesselton-born Kisil called it a day in 2006.

Her last school was SMK Putatan.

Husband Stephen Chong is also a retired teacher.

"As soon as I retired, I gathered bits and pieces of information.

It was my Mum, who passed on the family oral history to me.

I really got myself started because of my younger sister Catherine.

"I felt a sense of urgency as she battled with cancer. I let her read the first draft and she was much amused. Catherine was getting sicker and sicker.

I told myself that I had to finish the book when she was still able to read," she recalled.

It took Kisil about eight months to complete her manuscript for the editors at MPH Group Publishing.

By December 2008, the publisher had accepted the manuscript for publication. Catherine succumbed to her disease two years ago.