09 November 2010

Indonesia Visit Recalls Obama’s Formative Years

The future president lived in a modest Jakarta neighborhood with his mother, stepfather and sister during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

By Stephen Kaufman
Staff Writer

Washington — Barack Obama said it felt “wonderful” to return to Indonesia as president of the United States many years after he had lived in the country for four years as a boy, and he thanked the Indonesian government for posthumously awarding his late mother a gold medal for her research into the role of women and microcredits in Indonesian villages.

“The sights and the sounds and the memories all feel very familiar, and it’s wonderful to be able to come back as president and hopefully contribute to further understanding between the United States and Indonesia,” Obama said November 9 in a press conference with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

“I feel great affection for the people here,” he said, adding that the trip, curtailed slightly by the eruption of Mount Merapi, was “a shorter visit than I would like.”

At a state dinner following the press conference, Yudhoyono presented an award honoring Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, who had brought her family to Indonesia and conducted research that led to “a scientific paper of high quality regarding the role of women and microcredits in the villages,” Yudhoyono said.

Obama said the honor “speaks to the bonds she forged over many years with the people of this magnificent country” and said his mother believed that by educating women “we are, in fact, developing the entire country.”

OBAMA RECALLED “JOYOUS TIME” IN MEMOIRS

In 1967, 6-year-old Barack and his mother left their home in Hawaii for Jakarta. They came to join his new stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, who had been forced to abandon his studies at the University of Hawaii when he was conscripted into the Indonesian army. The future president was soon enrolled in a local public school and became known to friends as “Barry Soetoro.” Taller, foreign and of a different ethnicity than his friends and classmates, Barry stood out, but he soon made friends, and his mother encouraged him to learn Indonesian and rapidly acculturate to his new surroundings.

Known to friends and classmates as “Barry Soetoro,” Obama gained special insights from living in a new culture.

When then-Senator Barack Obama wrote his book The Audacity of Hope, which was published in 2006, he reflected on the four years he lived in Indonesia as “a joyous time, full of adventure and mystery.”

“We lived in a modest house on the outskirts of town, without air-conditioning, refrigeration or flush toilets,” Obama wrote in Audacity. His best friends were “the children of farmers, servants, tailors and clerks,” and his years in Jakarta were “days of chasing down chickens and running from water buffalo, nights of shadow puppets and ghost stories and street vendors bringing delectable sweets to our door.”

He joined an Indonesian Boy Scout troop and played soccer, or football, which would not become popular in the United States until years later. The future president also displayed a naughty schoolboy side, getting in trouble for crashing through a bamboo fence at school.

But young Obama’s life in Jakarta also exposed him to a sense of poverty, suffering and natural disaster that many Americans were unacquainted with. “The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel,” Obama later wrote in his 1995 book Dreams from My Father.

Compared to many of his Indonesian neighbors, Barry was relatively well-off. His stepfather surveyed roads and tunnels for the army, and later got a job with Mobil Oil. His sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, was born in Jakarta, and his mother earned additional income for the family by teaching English to Indonesian businessmen at the U.S. Embassy.

Obama said his mother’s ties to Indonesia never diminished, despite her decision to separate from Soetoro and move back to the United States in 1972. “For the next twenty years she would travel back and forth, working for international agencies for six or twelve months at a time as a specialist in women’s development issues, designing programs to help village women start their own businesses or bring their produce to market,” he wrote in Audacity.

With the help of his sister, Maya, their mother’s doctoral dissertation, Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, was revised and published as a book by Duke University Press in 2009.

In Dreams, Obama wrote that his upbringing and exposure to a new culture “made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well-mannered when compared to other American children.”

But his mother ultimately decided to send him back to Hawaii to continue his schooling. “She now had learned … the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere,” he wrote in Dreams.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)