Finding Myself in Borneo: Sojourns in Sabah
Description
Bronze, 2020 Independent Publisher Book Award Best Regional Non-Fiction: Australia / New Zealand / Pacific Rim
Winner of New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards 2019 for non-regional Biography / Autobiography / Memoir
Winner of Readers' Favorite Awards 2019 in the travel book category
Finding Myself in Borneo is an honest and buoyant chronicle of a young Canadian man's adventures during 1968-70, while teaching secondary school as a CUSO volunteer in Sabah, Malaysia (North Borneo). Travel with Neill McKee on his unique journey through vibrant Asian cultures as he learns the craft of teaching, the Malay language and local customs, and gains many friends in his small community. He climbs the highest peak in Southeast Asia-Mount Kinabalu, has a love affair, and navigates Borneo's backwaters to make his first of many documentary films. McKee travels by freighter to Indonesia, where he discovers the scars of that country's recent genocide, a contrast to his hilarious motorcycle journeys in Sabah with his American Peace Corps buddy. They make a hallucinogenic discovery-North Borneo is, indeed, J. R. R. Tolkien's famed Middle-Earth of The Lord of the Rings! The enterprising duo establish the North Borneo Frodo Society, an organization Tolkien joins.
McKee's second Sabah sojourn and other return trips offer the reader the opportunity to match the early anecdotes to what in fact happened to the land and people who touched his life, and he theirs.
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About the Author
Neill McKee is a communication specialist with 35 years of experience in international development, 15 of which have been based in developing countries. At the Center for Communication Programs at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University from 2001 to 2003, he was the Senior Technical Advisor for communication on HIV/AIDS and adolescent health, and Associate Director for Communication Sciences, Health Communication Partnership. He is presently the head of CCP's Healthy Russia 2020 Project, based in Moscow. Neill McKee is the author of Social Mobilization and Social Marketing in Developing Communities (1992) and chief editor and contributing author of Involving People, Evolving Behaviour (2000), two important books in the strategic communication field. He has worked with UNICEF in Asia and Africa from 1990 to 2000 and is the originator of the social cartoon characters Meena and Sara who have become popular role models for the empowerment of girls in South Asia and Africa respectively. He has also published a number of articles in the field of development communication and has produced over 30 films in international development in the 1970s and 1980s.
