Patrick Comerford
The life of a parish priest in the Diocese of Kuching is busy and demanding, as we found out in the past few weeks, as the Revd Dr Jeffry Renos Nawie took us on a number of whirlwind tours of his parishes and neighbouring churches covering vast areas south of Kuching.
Father Jeffry is a former principal of Saint Thomas’s, the Anglican diocesan boys’ school in Kuching, and has a doctorate in education. After he retired, he worked as the diocesan secretary in the diocesan office close to Saint Thomas’s Cathedral, and served at weekends in Saint George’s Church, Punau, on the fringes of Padawan.
Today, he is the parish priest of Saint Augustine’s Church, Mambong, which was designated a mission district six months ago (26 May 2025) by Bishop Danald Jute of Kuching.
The newly-designated mission district, near Padawan and Siburan, includes six other churches or chapels: Saint Francis, Petag; Saint Alban, Sitaang; Saint Monica, Bangau; Saint Edmund, Tabuan Rabak; Saint Clement, Patung; and Saint Matthias, Sinar Baru. In addition, he also takes some weekday services in Saint Thomas’s Cathedral, Kuching.
Charlotte and I visited the first six of his churches and chapels in one day. However, it was not until the end of the week that we got to visit Saint Matthias in Sinar Baru, after a morning visiting Semenggoh Wildlife Centre to see the orangutans.
Sinar Baru is a small village about 21 km south of Kuching, and the drive took us through Kota Padawan and Kota Sentosa. If it had been possible to continue driving south, we have reached the border with Indonesia within another half hour and crossed the Equator an hour or so later.
This is a lush tropical area in the highlands of Sarawak, in the heart of the Borneo rainforest and jungle. The village of Sinar Baru or Kampung Sinar Baru is a mainly Iban village in a predominantly Bidayuh area, with about 400 villagers and 62 households.
Last year, the Public Works Department handed over a new community hall to the village chief, Ngui Nam Chiew. The second phase will include an expansion of the hall, electricity and water supplies, and an additional carpark. Sarawak Heritage Council is organising craft workshops for the villagers, who are also planning a mini-library and baking classes.
Sinar Baru is close to the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre, just 3.5 km away, and less than 1 km from the Rajah Charles Brooke Memorial Hospital. The hospital began almost 100 years ago as a leprosarium or leprosy rehabilitation centre, built in 1925 for people from Sarawak, Sabah, Brunei and Indonesia diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease.
The hospital has been a public out-patient general hospital since 1974, serving a wide range of patients. Leprosy has been eradicated in the area, but some of the original residents remained, although they had been cured, because over the years they had become isolated from their communities and unable to look after themselves.
Saint Matthias is a newly-built church in Sinar Baru. There had been a wooden-built church in the village for generations, but when the landowner asked for the site back, a new site was donated and the new church was built in recent years.
As we met and talked to the parishioners of Saint Matthias, they told us of how they found the site and built the church. All they needed now, they told us, was a bell.They were praying and hoping for one that would be heard throughout the surrounding countryside, calling people to church on Sundays. They had a bell tower, but no bell.
Later that morning, as we visited Saint James’s Church in Quop, we heard how Bishop Francis McDougall wrote to friends in England appealing for bells for the churches being built in Sarawak in the 1860s: ‘I hope you could persuade some good people to bring them. Bells, we must have.’
One of the people who responded to his pleas was the banking heiress Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906), who donated the silver and nickel bell to the church in Quop. It is said locally that she wandered deep in the jungle and that whenever she lost her way she relied on the toll of the church bell for the Angelus, ringing at 6 am, 12 noon and 6 pm, to find her way home.
Back in Kuching that weekend, Charlotte and I wondered whether we could find or source a church bell for Saint Matthias Chapel in Sinar Baru. It was our first wedding anniversary that weekend, and we thought about the possibility of a thank-offering and how it might be another way of ringing our wedding bells a year later.
We made inquiries with Ho Nyen Foh, a tinsmith shop in Bishopsgate Street, one of the streets running between Carpenter Street and the Main Bazaar in Kuching’s old Chinatown.
At first it seemed like a difficult if not impossible task for a tinsmith. But as we talked he remembered how he had an old brass bell that his father had left at the back of the shop. It had come from England, and it may have been a school bell or a ship’s bell. He was unsure of its origins and, uncertain of its usefulness, he had kept it away for many years.
It was the right size, it was the right time, and it was the right occasion – and, yes, he would be happy to hold it for us over the next few days. He had held onto it all these years, and now it was going to find an appropriate home.
We returned with Father Jeffry to Sinar Baru and to Saint Matthias Chapel after the weekend to present the bell to the parishioners. It was our small way to say thanks to people of Kuching for their hospitality and to say thanks for the blessings of the first year of our marriage.
2 comments:
Love this story! Dick
Love this story! Dick
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