31 Jul 2025Cinta Mata: Urbanisation, Where Does it Begin and End?
Group photo of SEANNET 2025 Kundasang participants and Cinta Mata Village communities.
In the quiet highlands of Kundasang lies the village of Cinta Mata, where stories are not just told, they are grown, made, and lived through daily acts of care. As part of SEANNET 2025’s field immersion, participants were welcomed into this Dusun community not through spectacle but through the steady rhythm of life: planting, making, cooking, and reflecting. Here, cultural resilience isn’t a staged performance, it is a practice that has been lived for generations. The first steps into Cinta Mata told us everything. At the townhall, the community stood waiting, not in rows, but as a family. Each participant was welcomed individually, a gesture that set the tone for the rest of the day: personal, warm, human. A bamboo flute (seruling) and the soothing sounds of traditional instruments followed us as we walked in. It wasn’t a show. It was a message; “You are part of this for as long as you are here.” Women in Cinta Mata spoke about caregiving, and the quiet labour of keeping culture alive. They weren’t formal presentations, more like conversations under a shady roof. Elders spoke about how much the place has changed in their lifetimes and reminded us that taking care of the land and each other is an important cultural duty. This was a day of rolling up sleeves. Some of us joined simenfero work helping patch and strengthen walls with hand-mixed cement. Others worked on window-making, bending wire and hammering frames under the patient guidance of the villagers. Out in the fields, participants planted onions and flowers, our shoes sinking into the soft soil. And in the community kitchen, groups gathered to make ondeh-ondeh, laughing as the green dough stuck to our fingers. The sweet sticky filling of the ondeh-ondeh almost made us forget about the drizzling rain that first welcomed us during our arrival into Cinta Mata – such is the ebb and flow of Kundasang – the rain and drizzle oftentimes melts into nothingness when surrounded by the joys and laughters of its communities.
SEANNET 2025 Kundasang participants making Simenfero alongside Cinta Mata community members
Cinta Mata isn’t isolated from modernity. It lives on the edge of urbanisation. You can hear the faint hum of cars from the main road, and some houses have satellite dishes on their roofs. It makes you wonder, where does a city end and a village begin? The participants reflected on this in long conversations that evening: is it about buildings, roads, and shops, or is it about the way a community relates to land and to each other? For Cinta Mata, the answer seemed clear: even as the urban world creeps closer, their way of life, their memory, and their connection to the land continues to hold its ground. Cinta Mata reminds us that sustainability begins with attention to land, to memory, to one another. As Puan Sajian Binti Jupin, the Chairperson of the Cinta Mata community committee states, “We just showed what we do every day.” And in that everydayness, a world opened up.Written by Gaayathrey Balakrishnan