The Rainbow Troops (3 page)

Belitong Island
THE SMALL island of Belitong is the richest island in Indonesia, probably even in the world. It is part of Sumatra, but because of its wealth, it has alienated itself. There, on that remote island, ancient Malay culture crept in from Malacca, and a secret was hidden in its land, until it eventually was discovered by the Dutch. Deep under the swampy land, a treasure flowed: tin. Blessed tin. A handful was worth more than dozens of buckets of rice.

Like the Tower of Babel
,
the metaphoric stairway to heaven and symbol of power, tin in Belitong was a tower of prosperity incessantly looming across the Malacca Peninsula, as incessant as the pounding of ocean waves.

If one plunged his arm down into the shallow alluvial surface, or pretty much anywhere at all, it would reemerge shimmering, smeared with tin. Seen from off the coast, Belitong beamed of shiny tin, like a lighthouse guiding ship captains.

Famous throughout the world for its tin, it was written in geography books as
Belitong, Island of Tin
. But God did not bless Belitong with tin to prevent boats sailing to the island from getting lost. Instead, God had intended for the tin to be a guide for the inhabitants of the island itself. Had they taken God's gift for granted—until later they lost everything, like when the almighty punished the Lemurians?

The tin shone late into the night. Large-scale tin exploitation constantly took place under thousands of lights using millions of kilowatts of energy. If seen from the air at night, Belitong resembled a school of comb jellies glowing brightly, emitting blue light in the darkness of the sea; by itself, small, gleaming, beautiful and abundant.

And blessed is the land where tin flows, because like a widow flower swarming with honeybees, tin is always accompanied by other materials: clay, xenotime, zirconium, gold, silver, topaz, galena, copper, quartz, silica, granite, monazite, ilmenite, siderite, and hematite. We even had uranium. Layers of riches stirred below the stilted houses where we lived our deprived lives. We, the natives of Belitong, were like a pack of starving rats in a barn full of rice.

The Estate
That great natural resource was exploited by a company called PN Timah. PN stands for
Perusahaan Negeri
, or state-owned company
, Timah
means tin.

PN operated 16 dredges. The enterprise absorbed almost the entire island's workforce. It was a pulsing vein with a complete power monopoly over the whole island of Belitong.

The dredges' steel bowls never stopped digging into Belitong's soil. They were like giant, greedy snakes that knew no exhaustion. They were as long as football fields, and nothing could stand in their way. They smashed coral reefs, took down trees with trunks the size of small houses, demolished brick buildings with one blow, and completely pulverized an entire village. They roamed over mountain slopes, fields, valleys, seas, lakes, rivers and swamps. Their dredging sounded like roaring dinosaurs.

We often made foolish bets, like how many minutes it would take a dredge to turn a hill into a field. The loser, always Syahdan, would have to walk home from school backwards, not allowed to turn around at all. We would follow along, beating on tambourines while he waddled backwards like a penguin. His journey usually ended with him bottom up in a ditch.

The Indonesian government took over PN from the colonial Dutch. And not only were the assets seized, but also the feudalistic mentality. Even after Indonesia gained its freedom, PN's treatment of its native employees remained very discriminatory. The treatment differed based on caste-like groups.

The highest caste was occupied by PN executives. They usually were referred to as
Staff.
The lowest caste was comprised of none other than our parents, who worked for PN as pipe carriers, hard laborers sifting tin or daily paid laborers. Because Belitong had already become a corporate village, PN slowly assumed the form of a dominant hegemonic ruler and, fitting with the feudalistic design, the caste of a PN worker automatically bled over into non-working hours.

The Staff—almost none of whom were Belitong-Malays— lived in an elite area called the Estate
.
This area was tightly guarded by security, fences, high walls and harsh warnings posted everywhere in three languages: Formal colonialstyle Indonesian, Chinese and Dutch. The warning read "No Entry for those without the Right".

In our eyes—the eyes of poor village children—the Estate looked like it said, "Keep your distance." That impression was reinforced by a row of tall pinnate trees dropping blood-red pellets on the roofs of the expensive cars piled up at the garage exit.

The luxurious houses of the Estate were built in the Victorian style. Their curtains were layered and resembled movie theater screens. Inside, small families lived peacefully, with two, maybe three children at the most. They were always peaceful, dark, and not noisy.

The Estate was located on a high curve, giving the Victorian houses the appearance of nobles' castles. Each house consisted of four separate structures: the main chambers for the owners, the servants' quarters, the garage and the storage unit. All of them were connected by long, open terraces encircling a small pond. Captivating blue water lilies floated around the edge of the pond. In the center stood a statue of a potbellied child, the legendary Belgian peeing mannequin that always sprayed water out of its embarrassingly funny little piece.

Pots of silver ball cacti hung in rows on the rim of the roof. There was a special worker to tend to the flowers. Outside the circumference of the pond stood a square cage decorated with Roman pillars. It was the home of the English pigeons, voracious but tame.

The living room was filled with a large Victorian rosewood sofa. Sitting on it, one felt like an exalted king. Next to the living room stretched a long, intricate corridor. Expensive paintings of high artistic value, which, because of their greatness, were difficult to understand, hung along the corridor walls. My friend, if you were trying to get from the living room to the dining room and you weren't paying attention, you would get lost because of the abundance of doors in that house.

The occupants of the house ate dinner wearing their best clothes—they even put on their shoes for the meal. After placing their napkins on their laps, they ate without making a peep while listening to classical music, maybe Mozart's
Haffner No. 35 in D Major
. And no one put their elbows on the table.

On this serene night, the atmosphere of the Estate was very still. There was almost utter silence. There was some playful noise coming from the corner over there, but wait, it was just a poodle messing around with a few angora cats. A housemaid, after being snapped at by her boss, broke up the cute animals, and it was quiet once again. Not much later, the sound of tinkling piano keys escaped faintly from one of the tall-pillared Victorian homes. A small tomboy, Floriana, or Flo for short, was having a piano lesson. Unfortunately, she was a bit drowsy. Her chin rested on both of her hands, and she yawned over and over again. She was like a cat that had had too much sleep.

Her father, a
Mollen Bas,
head of all the dredges, sat beside her. He was infuriated by the behavior of the tomboy and embarrassed in front of the private piano teacher, a middleaged, wellmannered Javanese woman.

Flo's father was capable of managing the shifts of thousands of workers, competent in solving the most difficult of technical problems, successful in overseeing million-dollar assets, but when faced with this small girl, his youngest, he just about gave up. The louder Flo's father scolded her, the wider her yawns became.

The private teacher meekly started with the notations do, mi, so, ti, moving across four octaves, and showing the finger position for each notation, a basic hand-positioning exercise. Flo yawned again.

The PN School
The PN School was in the Estate compound, and it was a
center of excellence,
a place for the best. Hundreds of qualified students competed at the highest standard at this school, and one of them was Flo.

The difference between this school and ours was like the difference between land and sky. The PN School classrooms were adorned with educational cartoons, basic math tables, the periodic table, world maps, thermometers, photos of the President and VicePresident, and the heroic national symbol—which included that strange bird with an eight-feathered tail. There also were anatomy sculptures, big globes and models of the solar system. They didn't use chalk, but smelly markers, because their chalkboard was white.

"They have a lot of teachers," Bang Amran Isnaini, who once attended school there, informed me the night before my first day at Muhammadiyah Elementary. I became lost in thought.

"Each subject has its own separate teacher, even when you are in first grade."

I couldn't sleep that night, I was dizzy trying to count how many teachers the PN School had—and also of course because I was so excited about starting school the next day.

The first day of enrollment at the PN School was a joyous celebration. Not nervewracking like at our school. Dozens of fancy cars lined up in front of the school. Hundreds of wealthy children enrolled. That day, the new students were measured for three different uniforms.

The uniform for Mondays was a blue shirt with a beautiful floral print. Every morning, the PN School students were picked up by a school bus which also was blue. Whenever that vehicle passed us, we stopped, stared in amazement from the side of the road, and admired it. Seeing the PN School students getting off of the school bus reminded me of a picture of a group of small, cute, white and winged children getting off of a cloud, like in the Christian calendars.

The principal of the PN School was named Ibu Frischa, highly educated and very concerned with prestige. She managed her gestures in a way that accentuated her social class. Up close, anyone would feel intimidated. It was clear by the way she wore her makeup that she was fighting her age; it also was clear that it was a battle she had already lost.

Ibu Frischa was very proud of her school. If one had a chance to speak with her, she was only interested in talking about three things: the PN School's fancy facilities, the extravagant extracurricular budget, and her former students who were now successful in Jakarta.

The PN School was Belitong's most discriminating club. That school only accepted children of the Staff who lived in the Estate. There was an official rule that regulated which rank of employees could enroll their children at the PN School. And of course, on the gate hung that warning not to enter unless you had the right.

This meant that the children of fishermen, pipe carriers, daily paid laborers or hard laborers sifting tin, like our parents, and especially native children of Belitong, didn't have the least opportunity to receive a good education. If they wanted to go to school, they were forced to join the Muhammadiyah village school, which if caressed by just a little bit of strong wind, could fall apart.

This was the most ironic thing in our lives: the glory of the Estate and the glamour of the PN School were funded cent by cent from the tin that was scraped out of our homeland. Like the hanging gardens of Babylon built for the tyrant Nebuchadnezzar III for worshiping the god Marduk, the Estate was a Belitong landmark built to continue the dark dream of spreading colonization. Its goal was to give power to a few people to oppress many, to educate a few people in order to make the others docile. The worshiped god was none other than status, status built through the unjust treatment of the poor native inhabitants.

WITHOUT A DOUBT, if one were to zoom out, our village would appear to be the richest village in the world. The amount of mines sprawled across the land was unimaginable and trillions of rupiah were invested here. Billions of dollars flowed in like rats drawn to the melody of the Pied Piper's flute
.
Yet, zooming back in, the wealth of the island was visibly trapped in one place, piled up inside the fortress walls of the Estate.

Just an arm's length outside of those fortress walls spanned a strikingly contradictory sight, like a village chicken sitting next to a peacock. There lived the native Belitong-Malays, and if they didn't have eight children, then they weren't done trying. They blamed the government for not providing them with enough entertainment, so at night, they had nothing to do besides make children.

It would be an exaggeration to call our village a slum, but it would not be wrong to say it was a laborers' village shadowed by an endless eclipse since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Belitong Island, one of the first places in Indonesia occupied by the Dutch, had been oppressed for seven generations, when suddenly, in the blink of an eye, hundreds of years of the drought of misery were drenched in one night by a rain of torment: the arrival of the Japanese. My father vividly recalled the storm.

"My son, the soldiers who never let go of their bayonets' snouts turned our world into a hell." His innocent eyes reflected the anguish of a man whose dignity had been wounded and whose land had been robbed.

After three-hundred-fifty years, the Dutch said "good day" and the Japanese yelled "sayonara". Unfortunately, that wasn't the happy ending for us, the natives of Belitong. For we were to be occupied in another way. Our land was seized once again, but in a more
civilized
manner. We were freed, but not yet free.

From our yard, we could see the Estate's walls.

Our yard, overgrown with shrubs, velvet, and shoe flowers, was boring. Our crisscrossed fence, which leaned over the edge of ditches filled with still, brown water and mosquito nests, was also boring.

Our stilted, worn-out house was crammed into the same area as the police station, the PN logistics building, Chinese temples, the village office, the religious affairs office, dorms for dock coolies, sailors' barracks, the water tower, Chinese-Malay stores, dozens of coffee
warung
—traditional roadside stalls—and pawn shops always full of visitors. At the edge of the village, tucked away in a corner, was the long house of the Sawang tribe. Their house was long, and so is their story—which I promise to tell you later.

The rest were government offices, built with no logical plan in mind, and eventually abandoned, or used for
official
projects, legal and
halal
(permissible by Islamic law). The term
official
was often used to legitimize the corrupt robbery of state money.

The Chinese-Malays, as they sometimes are called, have lived on the island for a long time. They were first brought to Belitong by the Dutch to be tin laborers. Most of them were Khek from Hakka, Hokian from Fukien, Thongsans, Ho Phos, Shan Tungs, and Thio Cius. That tough ethnic community developed their own techniques for manually mining tin. Their terms for these techniques,
aichang, phok, kiaw
, and
khaknai
, are still spoken by Malay tin prospectors to this day.

As for the Malays, they lived like puppets—controlled by a small and comical but very powerful puppet master called a siren. At seven o'clock every morning, the stillness shattered. The siren roared from the PN central office. Immediately, PN coolies bustled about, emerging from every corner of the village to line up along the side of the road, jumping and jamming themselves into the backs of trucks which would bring them to the dredges.

The village fell quiet again. But moments later, an orchestra emerged as the women began crushing their spices. The sounds of pestles pounding against wooden mortars incessantly echoed from one stilted house to another, but when the clock struck five, the siren shrieked once again. The coolies dispersed to go home like ants fleeing a burning anthill. And that's how it went on, for hundreds of years.

Unlike at the Estate, when eating, the PN coolies were not accompanied by Mozart's
Haffner No. 35 in D Major.
Their meals were accompanied by bickering, husbands complaining about the menu—always the cheapest fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The complaint was then countered by a hysterical blast from the wife, "I should have been the wife of a worker in the Estate instead. You are just a coolie, be grateful for your fish!"

In the midst of their terrible fight at the dinner table, a calm backsound entered and harmonized the lyrics of their whimpering children, lined up neatly like boards in a fence, asking their parents to buy them new scout uniforms.

The economic strength of Belitong Island was dominated by the Staff living in the Estate. The businessmen receiving concessions from the tin exploitation lived in Jakarta, and the conspirators receiving bribes were none other than the politicians. But we didn't know these underhanded, behind-the-scenes people or where they lived. They sat prosperously on the highest throne in the most exclusive class. They were the biggest benefactors of the riches of our island. The businessmen and politicians often visited Belitong to see the massive tin exploitation destroying the island's environment. The expressions on their faces led me to believe that they might have forgotten we existed.

There was no middle class, or maybe there was—the public servants who engaged in small-scale corruption, or the law officers who took in extra money by intimidating the businessmen.

The lowest class was occupied by our parents, the PN coolies. PN paid them 30,000 rupiah per month. Back then, one of Uncle Sam's dollars was worth 2,500 rupiah, meaning for 30 days work, they made no more than twelve U.S. dollars. They were also given about 50 kilograms of rice.

They had no choice; that amount had to be sufficient to support a wife and at least seven children. But, don't worry, because surely, as sure as the coming of the judgment day, the coolies got an annual raise accompanied by a very personal message:
With this raise, we would like to show the company's appreciation for your hard work and to thank you for making the company proud
. Eight-hundred rupiah—that's about 80 cents—every year. Every year!

It would be a miracle comparable to Moses dividing the Red Sea if a coolie achieved a wage above 35,000 rupiah before reaching retirement, and only God and Moses know how they were able to make it through each month. The bitter reality of their wages meant only one thing: there was no room for a child's education in the plan of a coolie's family. And if that wasn't enough to discourage them, the educational discrimination practiced by PN further destroyed the spirits of the coolies to send their children to school.

My father said our family was still fortunate.

One of the extraordinary qualities of Malays is that no matter how bad their circumstances, they always consider themselves fortunate. That is the use of religion.

I remember something my father told me a few days before my first day of school. "My son, Muhammadiyah teachers like Pak Harfan and Bu Mus, fishermen, oil workers, coconut workers and dam keepers live in such poor conditions. You must be grateful to Allah for what we have."

That was the first time I heard Bu Mus' name. Then my father said that he heard that she, the new, young Muhammadiyah teacher, wanted to teach so village children can get an education.

That was the first time I accepted Bu Mus into my heart as a heroine.

Sahara, me, Kucai, Trapani, Harun and Mahar were the children of PN coolies. Lintang was the son of a fisherman, Borek was the son of a dam keeper, Syahdan was the son of a boat caulker, and A Kiong was the son of a Chinese farmer.

If we say the families of Sahara, me, Kucai, Trapani, Harun and Mahar were the jump rope of poverty, then the families of Lintang, Borek, Syahdan, and A Kiong played jump rope. When the winds were calm, they reaped a nice profit from shellfish and tapped rubber trees and were above the rope, having a little more money than us. But during the prolonged rainy season, they were below the jump rope of poverty and barely scraped by as the poorest of the poor on the island.

And despite our varying degrees of poverty, there was someone even poorer than all of us, and she wanted to be our teacher. I couldn't wait to meet the young girl my father had mentioned.

Destiny spun, fate interfered, and because of the arrival of Harun, the small girl whom I secretly admired stood in front of the class and introduced herself to us on our first day of school. She was somewhat awkward, because it was her first day teaching.

"Call me Bu Mus," she said proudly, as if she had waited her whole life to utter those words.

Bu Mus had just graduated from SKP (Vocational Girls' School), which was only equivalent to junior high school. It wasn't a teaching school, but more of a school to prepare young women to be good wives. There, they learned how to cook, embroider and sew. Bu Mus had been determined to go to the regency capital, Tanjong Pandan, to go to school at SKP so she could get a higher level diploma than that offered by the elementary school where she would teach.

Upon graduating from SKP, she was offered a job with PN as the rice warehouse head secretary—a very promising position. She had even been proposed to by the son of a business owner. Midah, Aini, Izmi and Nurul, her classmates, could not for the life of them understand why Bu Mus had turned down those two attractive offers. Unlike Bu Mus, those four swooped down and seized the opportunity to become PN administrative workers.

"I want to be a teacher," said the fifteen-year-old girl. She didn't say the sentence defiantly or with gusto.

She spoke calmly and slowly. But whoever was there when she spoke that sentence would know that Bu Mus dug every letter of each word from deep in her heart, and that the word "teacher" bubbled in her mind because she admired the noble profession of teaching. There was a giant sleeping inside of her, a giant that would wake up when she met her students.

Her determined choice to become a teacher would later bring Bu Mus unimaginable hardships—no one else wanted to teach at our school because there was no payment. Being a teacher at a poor private school, especially in our village, was a moneyless profession, only embarked on by those—according to a village joke—who weren't quite right in the head.

Yet Bu Mus and Pak Harfan filled their roles wholeheartedly. They taught every subject. After a day of killing herself in class, Bu Mus received sewing orders and worked on lace food covers. She sewed until late into the night, and that was her livelihood.

From day one, troubles endlessly came our way. Villagers jeered that our school was abysmal, and that our education would be in vain. People from the Estate made fun of our school by spelling Muhammadiyah as
Selamatdiyah,
meaning: May God have mercy on the students of that school. Not to mention the difficulty Bu Mus encountered trying to raise our selfconfidence, which hid in inferiority under the pretention of the PN School. In order to overcome this, Bu Mus hung her SKP diploma in a glass frame on the class wall, close to the Rhoma Irama poster. Very cool.

Our permanent problem was money. It was so bad that we often didn't even have enough to buy chalk. Whenever this happened, Bu Mus would bring us outside and use the ground as her chalkboard. But gradually, unexpectedly, all of these trials made Bu Mus a strong, young teacher—charismatic, in fact.

"Say your prayers on time, and later your reward will be greater," Bu Mus advised.

Wasn't this the testimony inspired by
surah An-Nisa
in the holy Koran, spoken hundreds of times by hundreds of preachers at the mosque and often echoed by members of the religious community? Somehow, when spoken by Bu Mus, those words were different and more powerful, resounding in our hearts. We later felt the remorse when we were late for prayer.

On one occasion, we were whining excessively about the leaky school roof. Bu Mus wouldn't hear of our complaints, but instead took out a book written in Dutch and showed us a picture from one of its pages. The picture was of a narrow room, surrounded by thick, gloomy walls that were tall, dark and covered with iron bars. It looked stuffy and full of violence.

"This was Soekarno's cell in a Bandung prison. Here he served his sentence. But he studied every day, and read all the time. He was our first president, and one of the brightest people our nation has ever produced." Bu Mus didn't continue the story.

We were astounded and our complaints fell silent. From that moment on, we never again whined about the condition of our school. One time, it was raining very hard, and thunder struck repeatedly. Rain spilled from the sky into our classroom. We didn't move an inch. We didn't want Bu Mus to stop the lesson and Bu Mus didn't want to stop teaching. We studied while holding umbrellas. Bu Mus covered her head with a banana leaf. That was the most awe-inspiring school day of my entire life. For the next four months it rained nonstop, but we never missed school, never, and we never complained, not even a little.

For us, Bu Mus and Pak Harfan were true patriots without medals of honor. They were our teachers, friends and spiritual guides. They taught us to make toy houses from bamboo, showed us the way to cleanse before prayer, taught us to pray before bed, pumped air back into our flattened bicycle tires, sucked poison from our legs if we were bitten by a snake, and from time to time made us orange juice with their bare hands. They were our unsung heroes, a prince and princess of kindness, and pure wells of knowledge in a forsaken, dry field.