15 years was way too long to wait for the government to make good on its promise, so villagers in the Pitas district of Sabah banded together and built a road all by themselves.
Through thick jungle. To cater for not one, not two, but at least seven villages in the area.
The residents of Pitas, which lies about 230km away from Kota Kinabalu, had been promised a new connective road by the state government over a decade ago, but the district never saw any work being done to keep that promise.
In 1999, the project to build a connective road between Pitas’ seven villages was approved under the Seventh Malaysia Plan – the country is now implementing the Eleventh Malaysia Plan – but work on the road was abandoned after only a few kilometres had been laid out.
The new road that they themselves have completed, while not tarred, does the job of cutting the commute times of the local residents down to a fraction of what they were before.
“Now, it takes our children just an hour to get to their school in Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan Pitas, as opposed to three hours before,” said local Janting Madisa, one of the hundreds who volunteered to work on the road, when contacted by The Rakyat Post‘s Sandra Sokial.
Locals chipped in not only their time and effort into the road, but money as well – each resident put in between RM5 and RM50 each for the project.
A “kind-hearted Samaritan”, Janting said, lent the villagers the machinery necessary to level out the road, and so work on the project began on June 23 last year.
“It was completed in October. It was in February this year that help again came in from a non-governmental organisation, and we were able to install culverts.
“The stretch may not be perfect as it does get hard to pass when it rains, but at least we have a road that links the villages here.”
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