Immersion Project 3 :: Journey to Herbal Shop ::

Good evening to everyone. Today I want to share with you about our immersion project entitled Journey to Herbal Shop. That place is located at Batu Caves as we want to get the nearest place to our Mahalah. Moreover we noticed that Batu Caves in most suitable place to conduct this project because of its diversity and different races that we know it is crucial and will make easy our project.

The objectives that we want to achieve in this project is

1. To gain knowledge about chinese herbs in detail
2. To know the importance of the herbs that they used in traditional medical setting
3. To get information about the culture of Chinese at that place

At first  we searched for the suitable place, we got some difficulties in getting the parking lot because of it is the centre of food stall, bank and supermarket. After half an hour, finally we found the vacant car parking (in front of a supermarket) and we need to walk away for 5 minutes to reach at the herbal shop.



Our first destination is Kedai Ubat Fu Sing. Firstly, we greet the worker. The worker is a lady. We tell her the purpose of our visit. But the lady said that she not really fluent in Malay. Furthermore, she said that we should get the information  of Chinese Herb from her boss. Then we tries to convince her but she still give the same answer to us.She also did not look so friendly stances. Besides, she said that her employers was having lunch at that time and she did not know when her boss will come back. We feel very disappointed because we saw her boss at the back of the shop. However, we can't force others to cooperate if they refuse right? Maybe they have their own reason.

After waiting for several time, we decided to find another place.We move to the next shop with a new hope that they will cooperate with us.



Since Chinese population is the majority race in this place, we did not get so much difficulties in finding another shop that offering the traditional chinese herbs. When move to the next place, after introducing ourselves as IIUM students, the taukeh refused to share with us about this information. He gave excuses that he cannot speak Malay fluently and if among us can speak Mandarin, he will deal with us. We tried to persuade him and told him that this is our important project that we need to finish but he still reluctant. Again, we could not get this information.

Cooperation is not there, so it's hard for us to continue with our purpose. We can understand that it is difficult for us if we interrupt their business. Even though there is no customers at that time, yet nobody wants to entertain us...pity us!

We might  feel dissapointed, but we're can still smile  :)

What  experiences that we got  today?


Ermm,  actually  even  though  they are  not  give full  cooperation  with us, here we understand  that people  have different values and  belief  that they  may  hold  since  long time ago. We know  that  perhaps there are concrete  reasons  why they are reluctant to share with us about the information.
In our opinion,  language barrier is the primary factor of this issue.Maybe the owner of Chinese Herb refuse to give the cooperation because the language barrier. They may feel difficult if they have to translate the Chinese term to Malay or English. In addition, people from different place might have different perception of each other.

But never mind. Our journey will not stop here. It is still  long that we must walk until the end.