I established this as I started tearing outside the Cilandak huts, twelve years after moving away from Jakarta.
Cilandak is the middle/high school campus of JIS (Jakarta International School). When I began Grade 1 at Pattimura (the elementary campus) in 1991, Cilandak housed grades 5-12. By the time I reached 4th Grade, they knocked that up to Grade 6. Halfway through my grade 5 year, we moved back to Canada. Needless to say, I never got to go to Cilandak.
For an ex-pat kid in Jakarta, this was like the loss of the San Francisco dream.
While missing 'home' was a popular hobby in Jakarta (my sister and I had a song: "snow, the white stuff/that comes from the sky/I'll probably never see it 'till the day I die") - integrating back into the Canadian public school system lacked a certain lustre. Field trips into bat caves were disdainfully exchanged for standing immobile in -30 degree weather and drawing on my shoes during banal teachings. I was a year ahead, which was compensated for by being left in the back of the classroom with a Grade 6 math textbook to forever subsist on long division. The cartoon on the student drawn classroom yearbook of my grade 5 year in Canada had a bubble above my head reading "I like to talk about Jakarta." Shortly thereafter, I gave up alluding to my long lost forlorn land in the east.
So we headed back into this hyperbole of history.
The Pattimura Tree:
To my surprise, Pattimura was a world that very comfortably took its bow. Considering the majority of my time in Jakarta was spent at that school, in our air-con home, or in the Blue Bird air-con luxury bus ride that connected the two...it was merely more than walking through a collection of recess histories. In second grade, this meant assuming I was a Terminator as I walked down the stairs without bending my knees. In third grade, crawling across the field to agitate the formal soccer arena. This irritated people, which my friends and I took as a performance reward. Playing airplane on the swings was my favourite Pattimura pastime, in which I was nominated to make the pre-departure flight announcements (familiarized from frequent travel to Singapore). This was followed by high speed gain, and spinning to twist the chains (turbulence). My (oh so) praised moments of inner reflection generally took place while blurring my vision behind the nets that separated the walkway from the four-square games. Elementary level psychotropicalia.
Behind the optical-illusion four-square net:
They took out the fish pond and put in a pool, and replaced the gymnasium with an indoor cafeteria. Unfortunately, this steeply impedes watching flies assassinate themselves in the fluorescent lights, another lunch hour past time. The 2nd grade curriculum still covers healthy eating while focusing on the importance of a good breakfast, though Orange Bird is no longer the representative. Standing and talking to a new 2nd grade teacher in my old 2nd grade classroom, I remembered that it was the same room I did a frog jump with a pencil in my sock. I still have a piece of (artificial) lead in my leg. The paper towel dispenser in the classroom is still intact. It reads "paper towel."
Then Cilandak, where being an adolescent expat in Indonesia greets you at the gates.
Wandering the campus omnisciently reinstated my realization that most of the kids aren't really cognitive that they're living in Indonesia. The expat student demographic tends to stay confined between home and school, and so the campus becomes its own incubated society. The new FBI style security at the entrance (full with vehicle bomb check) dismisses any lingering cultural integration that had existed in the nineties. You're sheltered from adolescent pop culture, and while such vacancies are retrieved on home leave, there is both a purity and a naivete to the student life. But to them, as it was to us, Jakarta is merely a world of maids and backyard pools, of bleaching vegetables and spraying for mosquitos, of shopping at the Duty Free store for homeland imports, and of lice checks and TB tests.
It was a sterile world. But the visions once seen through windows linger and mature; carried intangible in a suitcase until you return.
-Tara
1 comment:
In a fit of nostalgia, I did a Google search just to see if any pictures of the Pattimura Tree existed online, and it led me to your blog. I spent first through third grade at Pattimura in the early '90s as well, and seeing these pictures of yours, the stories of those swingsets, the four-square lots, the old hot air balloon that doubled as a prison for whoever you captured on the playground that day... You have no idea what seeing this all means to me. I always rode the biggest Blue Bird from Kuningan, and it was always a tough call to decide between Western and Asian lunch. I'm sad to hear the old outdoor lunch area has been done away with, the bugs were always an adventure. I had Ms. Pulls for first grade, Mr. McDowald for second, and Mrs... I can't recall her name, my third grade teacher. Do you remember them at all?
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